Active clinical trials for "Neoplasms"

Objectives of the study are: To estimate the incidence of venous thromboembolism (VTE) in a cohort of women with suspected ovarian cancer and evaluate changes in the coagulation system in case of benign or malignant disease. The impact of changes in the coagulation system on disease prognosis will be evaluated.

Subtle myocardial deformation abnormalities in asymptomatic nf-1 patients: is cardiac screening needed?

Investigator determined the factor of surgery associated with the survival of pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.

Early adenocarcinoma of the lung has an excellent five-year survival after resection. However, its clinical and radiologic presentation is highly variable. Traditional means for preoperative diagnosis such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET-CT) and trans-thoracic needle biopsy demonstrate unacceptable false positive and negative rates. Telomere biology is activated aberrantly is most lung cancers but has not been studied in early stages to the best of our knowledge. The objective of this study is to evaluate telomere length and activity with suspected early stage adenocarcinoma of the lung.

The investigators plan to recruit patients for a prospective study in patients in need of evaluation for lung lesions suspicious for cancer. Saliva samples will be collected before diagnostic evaluation including biopsy with subsequent blinded examination of the salivary markers without knowledge of the disease status. This prospective recruitment with retrospective blinded evaluation or PRoBE design satisfies the highest standards recommended by the National Cancer Institute for biomarker development. This process limits the selection bias that can confound retrospective studies. As the primary endpoint, a pre-specified multi-marker panel will be evaluated based on the combination of sensitivity and specificity. In addition, seven pre-specified individual candidate mRNA cancer markers and six internal reference or "housekeeping" genes will be evaluated. The performance of new multi-marker panels will also be assessed and compared with the prior pre-specified model based on sensitivity and specificity combinations as well as the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve.

Currently, patients of suitable fitness with non-metastatic esophageal cancer are treated with surgery, radiotherapy or chemoradiotherapy. If treated with radio or chemoradiotherapy, a Computerised tomography (CT) scan is performed and is the dataset used for planning radiotherapy. Information from the endoscopic ultrasound (EUS), performed during routine staging, is used to help localize the tumor, as tumors of the esophagus are poorly visualised on CT. This information is subjective and dependant on the clinician performing the procedure. The tumor is described in relation to common anatomical landmarks. Interpretion of this information can lead to over-compensation when attempting to cover the tumor with a radiation field, to avoid a "miss". It is thought that using fiducial markers called Visicoils placed in or adjacent to the tumor's top and bottom extent at the time of EUS, will lead to better definition of the tumor in the planning process and hence, improvement in local tumor control, and reduction in radiotherapy dose to normal tissue.

In the United States, the highest incidence of cervical cancer occurs in inner city urban centers, rural areas, the deep South, Appalachia and the U.S.-Mexico border. The goal of this study is to study predictors of adherence among patients seeking care at an inner city medical center in New York City and the U.S. Mexico border for cervical cancer prevention, namely, Pap smears and colposcopy exams.

Natural Killer cells (NK) are pivotal cells of innate immunity, that sense defective expression of HLA class I molecules and are complementary to specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes. A defect in NK cell cytotoxicity has been described in some hematopoietic malignancies such as acute myeloid leukemia, multiple myeloma, myelodysplastic syndroms. This defect is at least partially linked to a decreased or absent expression of some activating NK cell molecules, more particularly the so-called Natural Cytotoxicity Receptors (NCRs) NKp30, NKp44 and NKp46. Some old publications have demonstrated defective NK cytotoxicity in myeloproliferative syndroms (chronic myeloid leukemia, primary thrombocytosis, polycythemia vera). The investigators more particularly focused their attention on polycythemia vera (Vaquez's disease), a myeloproliferative disease characterized by the recently describet mutation V617F of the JAK2 tyrosine kinase. The investigators will precise the mechanisms leading to this cytotoxicity defect, the investigators also will evaluate the implication of V617F mutation on NK physiology, and will study the interactions between NK cells and hematopoietic progenitors.

The present study is designed to determine the mutational status of markers (TET2 and PLCb2, cytogenetic aberrations) together with methylation status of the above genes using bone marrow and matched buccal cell samples from MDS patients who necessitate to start a treatment (i.e. EPO, Lenalidomide, Azacytidine). All patients included in the study will be followed for at least 2 years.

As a result of increasing adoption of health information systems in hospitals, more and more health records can be gathered and accumulated in the healthcare data repository. For this reason, the opportunity of analyzing and mining the healthcare data for quality improvement is increasing and becoming more and more important. The purpose of the project is to gather the clinical data relevant to liver cancer, and adopt the knowledge discovery and mining modules in information technology (IT) for analyzing and discovering the knowledge from the gathered clinical data. We can analyze the gathered clinical data for comparing the outcomes of different treatment strategies, finding out new diagnosis and staging criteria and factors, and other hidden knowledge included in the clinical data. Afterwards, the discovered results and the mining algorithms can be shared though the sharable knowledge mining platform provided by our project.