Мanagement of rare cancers

PubMed, the Internet portal of biomedical and life sciences literature, indexed an interesting article, entitled “Prognostic factors and management of rare cancers.” (Cancer Radiother. 2006 Nov;10(6-7):323-9. Epub 2006 Sep 6). Authors are Belkacemi Y, Zouhair A, Ozsahin M et al., from the Departements d’Oncologie-Radiotherapie et de Senologie, CLCC Oscar-Lambret et Faculte de Medecine, Universite de Lille-II, Lille, France. The management of rare cancers is controversial. The role of adjuvant therapies, such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy remains unclear. The limited number of patients included in the studies cannot generally allow any consistent statistical analysis to determine either prognostic factors or the impact of surgery and adjuvant therapies on local control and long-term survival. The Rare Cancer Network is a multi-institutional cooperative group created in 1993 to initiate large retrospective studies on rare cancers with the aim of improving our knowledge in terms of management, outcome, and prognostic factors of such tumors. The network gathers more than 70 institutions from 21 countries. To access the abstract of the article, click here.