Assessment of bone turnover markers and DXA parameters to predict bone metastasis progression during zoledronate treatment: a single-center experience.

Bone metastases (BM) are a serious cancer complication, potentially causing substantial morbidity. Among the clinical issues related to BM, there is the lack of specific tools for early diagnosis and prognosis. We explored whether combining bone turnover markers (BTM) with dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) assessment could identify early BM progression and risk of skeletal-related events (SREs) during zoledronate treatment.

Anaplastic Classic Kaposi Sarcoma: PD-L1 Expression and Response to Immunotherapy: A Case Report and Review of the Literature.

Anaplastic classic Kaposi sarcoma (CKS) is an extremely rare pathologic variant of CKS characterized by high aggressiveness and poor prognosis. We report the clinical course of this malignant histologic form in an otherwise healthy 67-year-old male from Apulia in Southern Italy. The anaplastic progression arose during a long history of CKS and developed after multiple local and systemic treatments.

Durvalumab in advanced cholangiocarcinoma: is someone knocking down the door?

Following the practice-changing results observed in several hematological and solid tumors, immunotherapy with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) has been tested in cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) patients. However, ICI monotherapy has had disappointing results in CCA, and phase I-III clinical trials have assessed whether combinatorial strategies including immunotherapy plus other anticancer agents may have a synergistic activity. The TOPAZ-1 trial has recently highlighted improved survival in CCA patients receiving first-line durvalumab plus gemcitabine-cisplatin compared with gemcitabine plus cisplatin alone, and several guidelines consider adding durvalumab to the reference doublet as standard of care.

A new reliable method for tissue preservation.

Studying and developing preanalytical tools and technologies for preserving high-quality tissues for histological assays is a constantly growing field because preserving biological samples always poses a challenge. Formalin fixation and paraffin embedding (FFPE) remains a key component of long-term tissue preservation in the histopathology and pathology laboratory, despite its known carcinogenic effect and poor preservation of nucleic acids. Over the years, some other methods have been described to preserve biological tissues such as plastination.

Primary lymph node gastrinoma: a case report and review of the literature.

Background: Gastrinoma is a rare form of neuroendocrine neoplasm. The presence of a primary lymph node localization of gastrinoma is a much debated and controversial topic in the literature, as regards whether these cases represent metastatic disease from an as yet unidentified primary tumor, or the de novo occurrence of a gastrinoma in a lymph node.

Case Presentation: We report the case of a 24-year-old male with intense epigastric pain treated at the beginning with high dose proton pump inhibitors.

Iatrogenic Kaposi sarcoma of the terminal ileum following short-term treatment with immunomodulators for Crohn disease: A case report.

Rationale: Kaposi sarcoma (KS) is a mesenchymal neoplasm associated with human herpes virus-8. It is often found in patients with primary or secondary immunodeficiency. An iatrogenic form of KS is detectable in patients who have received immunosuppressive therapy.

Obese zebrafish: A small fish for a major human health condition.

Obesity is becoming a silent worldwide epidemic, with a steady increase in both adults and children. To date, even though several drugs have been licensed for long-term obesity treatment, none of them are yet used in routine clinical practice. So far the only successful intervention has been behavioral therapy.

Gender-differences of in vitro colonic motility after chemo- and radiotherapy in humans.

Background: The aim of the present in vitro study was to investigate, in different genders, motor responses in surgical colonic specimens from patients with rectal cancer undergoing and not undergoing chemotherapy with capecitabine and radiotherapy.

Methods: This in vitro study was conducted from October 2015 to August 2017 at the Experimental Pharmacology Laboratory at the National Institute "S. de Bellis" after collecting samples at the Department of Surgery.

Rectal indomethacin or intravenous gabexate mesylate as prophylaxis for acute pancreatitis post-endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography.

Objective: We aimed to evaluate the results in our case series of AP ERCP over the last three years. The prophylaxis for acute pancreatitis (AP) post-endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) consists of rectal indomethacin, but some studies are not concordant.

Patients And Methods: We compared 241 ERCP performed from January 2014 to February 2015 with intravenous gabexate mesylate (Group A), with the 387 ERCP performed from March 2015 to December 2016 with rectal indomethacin (Group B) as prophylaxis for AP post-ERCP.