Active clinical trials for "Neoplasms"

Cancer of the colon and rectum are the third most common cancers in Canadian males and females. The initial therapy of colorectal cancer is surgery to remove the cancer and nearby lymph glands. If the cancer has spread to the lymph glands there is a high chance that the cancer will come back. To reduce the risk of the cancer recurring, patients are treated with an anticancer drug 5-fluorouracil (5FU) in combination with a vitamin leucovorin (LV). This study will determine if a simple blood test can predict which patients are at risk for developing side effects from this chemotherapy. In addition, participants of this study will be followed to determine if this same blood test will predict which patients will have their cancer relapse.

The purpose of this study is determine if the AB Prep (a 16 tablets colon cleansing prep), is an effective, and safe colon cleansing prep in preparation for colonoscopy, and severe constipation.

RATIONALE: Studying samples of blood from patients with cancer in the laboratory may help doctors learn more about changes that occur in DNA and identify biomarkers related to cancer. PURPOSE: This study is looking at genetic susceptibility for cancer and interactions between genes and the environment in patients with ovarian cancer.

RATIONALE: Studying genes in samples of blood and/or tumor tissue from patients with cancer may help doctors identify biomarkers related to cancer. PURPOSE: This research study is looking at blood and/or tumor tissue samples from patients with ductal carcinoma in situ and blood samples from healthy volunteers.

Ovarian cancer is the first in mortality rate of the gynecologic malignancies and the overall 5-year survival rate of ovarian cancer is only 20-30%. Besides, the incidence of ovarian cancer increased in recent years in Taiwan. Ovarian cancer is indeed a disease that should be respected, however, there has only been a little research done focusing on it in Taiwan. Patients with ovarian cancer who have stage I disease (localized to ovaries) after optimal surgical staging do not need any adjuvant therapy. In contrast, patients with disease spreading beyond the ovaries have median survival rates that decrease to < 10% for patients with bulky residual disease after surgery and treated with platinum-based combination chemotherapy. In developing effective therapy for ovarian cancer, there should be a distinction between preventative and therapeutic approaches. Immunoprevention will be developed for women who are at an increased risk for the development of ovarian cancer. In contrast, immunotherapy would be used as an adjuvant to surgery or in combination with chemotherapy or other biologics as chemoimmunotherapy or biochemoimmunotherapy. Mesothelin is expressed in some normal epithelial cells and is elevated in certain carcinomas. Mesothelin has been reported to be selectively overexpressed in most of the non-mucinous ovarian carcinomas. In addition, the specific epitopes of mesothelin in the HLA-A2 and A24 haplotype have been identified. It seems that mesothelin has the potential to be a target antigen for the immunotherapy of ovarian cancer. So the investigators would like to provide this proposal to address the development of mesothelin -specific immunologic assays. There are two aims in this project: to develop and utilize assays to measure cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) to mesothelin, and to evaluate the mesothelin-specific immunologic responses between normal control and ovarian cancer patients.

Dopamine (DA) is one of the main catecholamines in mammals. Its major role as a brain neurotransmitter is well known as well as its contribution to the development of pathologies, mainly arterial hypertension. Traditionally, dopamine receptors are divided into two families according to the stimulation or inhibition they may produce at the adenyl cyclase level. Five dopamine receptors have been identified: D1 (D1a) and D5 (D1b) exist in the D1 family. D2s, D2l, D3 and D4 belong to the D2 family. Formerly, less than 1% of patients with hypertension were believed to have primary hyperaldosteronism; however, recent studies have suggested that primary aldosteronism affects 5-13% of patients with hypertension and aldosteronomas are a more common cause of hypertension than previously thought. At least 2% of patients with hypertension may have an aldosteronoma. The investigators' previous clinical observation found two subtypes of aldosterone-producing adenoma (APA), which were defined according to their responses to metoclopramide during salt manipulation. On a high-salt diet (HS), the nonsuppressible subjects, with less dopaminergic inhibition of aldosterone secretion, had less urinary DA excretion and greater blood pressure (BP) elevation [Wu KD et al. 2002]. The investigators' recent study of six patients with an APA found that the expression of the D2 receptor in APA was not universal. The amounts of D2 receptor messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) were more variant in either APA or their remnant adrenal glands. Only two cases of APA expressed the D2 receptors with much weaker signals compared with those in their respective remnant adrenals [Wu KD et al. 2001]. The investigators' current work demonstrates that the D2 receptor negatively regulates AII-stimulated aldosterone secretion and aldosterone synthase mRNA expression in NCI-H295R cells. On the other hand, the D4 receptor counteracts with the effect of the D2 receptor. In a future study, the investigators wish to quantify D2 and D4 receptor mRNA and protein expression in APA and their remnant adrenal glands and correlate them to their clinical metoclopramide test results. The investigators also wish to know whether the difference between the D2 and D4 receptor expression reflect the different effects of dopamine inhibition on AII-stimulated aldosterone secretion and aldosterone synthase transcription. Finally, the investigators will explore the role of D2 and D4 receptors on AII-stimulated adrenal cell proliferation.

This project seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of a new post-operative pain relief program for women who have undergone uterine artery embolisation (UAE). UAE is performed by an interventional radiologist as a treatment of uterine fibroids (non-cancerous growths of the uterus.) UAE can be associated with a high level of post-procedural pain and it is the purpose of this study to evaluate a new relief regimen for dealing with this acute pain. There will be two treatment groups into which patients will be randomly assigned. One will receive the current post-operative therapy (dose-on-demand) and the other will receive the new therapy (pre-emptive dosing). Otherwise patients will receive standard management protocol for this procedure. Only patients that are scheduled for UAE will be enrolled (up to 40 patients). The new treatment involves giving the patient their morphine dose orally and sixty minutes before the procedure begins (pre-emptive dosing) as opposed to current standard treatment which involves giving the patient a dose of morphine intravenously once they feel pain. Information to be collected directly from patients includes pain and nausea levels, indicated on a visual scale (a 10 centimetre line showing a spectrum of no pain to worst pain imaginable) as well as their opinions of the effectiveness of the pain relief program and the procedure itself. This information is to be collected immediately post-procedure and at 2, 4, 6 and 24 hours post procedure. Each VAS will take the patient approximately 20 seconds to complete. Information about concurrent medication and procedure complications, post-operative vomiting and respiratory depression will be collected from the patient's history.

Laparoscopic assisted vaginal hysterectomy (LAVH)has become the most prevalent operation method in woman suffering from uterine myoma or adenomyosis nowadays. The operation decisions for these women are always due to symptoms such as pain, anemia and mass effect. However, there is a lack of measurement for these symptoms and therefore highlight the need to validate these symptom by health-related quality of life (QOL) assessments. Patients usually recovered better by LAVH comparing to traditional open surgeries. However, LAVH was restricted to cases with small size uteri and most QOL reported neglected uterine weight or were based on small uteri size. We recently intervened a new surgical procedure called RULU during LAVH and thus released this limitation. This will give a more unbiased study on the effect of QOL in patients receiving LAVH. In this study, we plan to use two questionnaires: the disease specific UFS-QOL and the WHO-QOL Taiwan version questionnaires for patients receiving LAVH. Assessment will be performed before operation; and 3 days, 7 days, 3 months and 18 months after operation. From these assessments, we plan to determine which QOL variables will be useful as operation guidelines for patients suffering from leiomyoma or adenomyosis, and for the assessment of appropriates and outcomes of LAVH.

In this observational single-center cohort study, metagenomic Next-Generation Sequencing (mNGS) will be used to investigate the features and changes of gut microbiota in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients during the treatment of two different induction therapy regimens [standard intensive chemotherapy (7+3) or bcl-2 inhibitor-based targeted therapy].

We collect prospectively and retrospectively, patients' demographic, pathological, surgical, therapeutic and prognosis informations in a database. After patient's consent to collect tumoural samples of their colorectal cancer after resection. We will then be able to evaluate the impact of HSP110, a chaperon protein, on their prognosis. Other proteins (to be determined) will also be study, after.