Background: Patients with advanced well-differentiated neuroendocrine tumours (Wd-NETs) are commonly treated with somatostatin analogues (SSAs). Some patients may develop SSA-related side effects such as pancreatic exocrine insufficiency (PEI).
Methods: In this prospective, observational study, the frequency of SSA-induced PEI in 50 sequential patients with advanced Wd-NETs treated with SSAs was investigated. Toxicity was assessed monthly and faecal elastase-1 (FE1) and quality of life (QoL) were assessed 3-monthly.
Results: The median age was 65.8 years, 58% were male and the majority (92%) of patients had metastatic disease; patients received 4-weekly long acting octreotide (60%) or lanreotide (40%). Twelve patients (24%) developed SSA-related PEI after a median of 2.9 months from SSA initiation; FE1 was a reliable screening tool for PEI, especially in symptomatic (abdominal bloating, flatulence and/or diarrhea) patients (risk ratio 8.25 (95% confidence interval 1.15-59.01)). Most of these patients (11/12; 92%) required PERT. Other SSA-related adverse events (any grade) included flatulence (50%), abdominal pain (32%), diarrhoea (30%) and fatigue (20%). Development of PEI did not significantly worsen overall QoL, however gastrointestinal symptoms and diarrhoea were increased.
Conclusion: This study demonstrated that PEI occurs at a higher rate than previously reported; clinicians need to diagnose and treat this SSA-related adverse-event which occurs in 1 in 4 patients with Wd-NETs treated with SSAs. Screening with FE1 in symtomatic patients is recommend.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17474124.2018.1489232 | DOI Listing |
Clin Trials
January 2025
Rare Diseases Team, Office of New Drugs, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, MD, USA.
Background/aims: Rare disease drug development faces unique challenges, such as genotypic and phenotypic heterogeneity within small patient populations and a lack of established outcome measures for conditions without previously successful drug development programs. These challenges complicate the process of selecting the appropriate trial endpoints and conducting clinical trials in rare diseases. In this descriptive study, we examined novel drug approvals for non-oncologic rare diseases by the U.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the context of Chinese clinical texts, this paper aims to propose a deep learning algorithm based on Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT) to identify privacy information and to verify the feasibility of our method for privacy protection in the Chinese clinical context. We collected and double-annotated 33,017 discharge summaries from 151 medical institutions on a municipal regional health information platform, developed a BERT-based Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Model (BiLSTM) and Conditional Random Field (CRF) model, and tested the performance of privacy identification on the dataset. To explore the performance of different substructures of the neural network, we created five additional baseline models and evaluated the impact of different models on performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiomark Med
January 2025
The Nutristasis Unit, Synnovis, St. Thomas' Hospital, London, UK.
This case describes a patient with pancreatic exocrine insufficiency and persistently elevated serum vitamin B12 concentrations that were not due to supplementation or associated with hepatic or hematological pathology. Laboratory investigations suggested the presence of macro-B12 as the cause of this patient's raised serum vitamin B12. Macro-B12 is often formed when vitamin B12-vitamin binding proteins (transcobalamin and haptocorrin) complex with immunoglobulins.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClin Trials
January 2025
Department of Biostatistics, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA.
Introduction: The sequential parallel comparison design has emerged as a valuable tool in clinical trials with high placebo response rates. To further enhance its efficiency and effectiveness, adaptive strategies, such as sample size adjustment and allocation ratio modification can be employed.
Methods: We compared the performance of Jennison and Turnbull's method and the Promising Zone approach for sample size adjustment in a two-phase sequential parallel comparison design study.
Ocul Immunol Inflamm
January 2025
Ocular Oncology Service, Institute of Oncology, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico.
Purpose: To present the case of a young patient with BRAF V600E-mutant cutaneous melanoma who developed bilateral choroidal metastases complicated by neovascular glaucoma (NVG) in both eyes following the interruption of nivolumab therapy.
Methods: A 28-year-old female with primary cutaneous melanoma of the left hand underwent surgical resection and adjuvant nivolumab. Immunotherapy was discontinued due to immune-related acute interstitial nephritis.
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