Active clinical trials for "Bone Marrow Diseases"

This is a retrospective/prospective observational multicentric trial on patients with bone metastases from NENs. General objectives: To trace on a national scale the frequency of bone metastases in patients with neuroendocrine neoplasm (NEN) and their clinical management. To correlate clinical and biological factors to clinical outcomes. To centralise and to make homogeneous clinical, pathological, instrumental and therapeutic information. To set up a database and to acquire biological material for studying predictive and prognostic biomarkers.

Bone metastasis (i.e. cancer cell spreading to bone) is the major clinical problem of advanced breast cancer patients. Bone metastasis is not curable nor preventable. Currently available therapeutic approaches are only palliative. The major hurdle for improving bone metastasis treatment is lack of sensitive diagnostic tools. Diagnosis of bone metastasis is heavily dependent on radiographic imaging of bone destruction that are detectable only when the lesion is significantly large. Accordingly, if bone metastasis can be detected at an earlier time point when bone destruction is minimal or incipient, treatments can be given earlier and the patients can expect better outcomes. We and others previously have found that a subset of bone-forming cells (i.e. circulating osteocalcin-positive cells) exists in the blood stream of the patients with bone diseases (e.g. bone metastasis and inflammation) or active bone formation (e.g. adolescence) in mouse models anf human samples. Extended from this laboratory observation, this clinical study proposes to test the hypothesis that circulating osteocalcin-positive cells are the early biomarker of breast cancer bone metastasis. For this aim, this study will measure circulating osteocalcin-positive cells in the blood samples of breast cancer patient, and examine whether the measure sensitively detects bone metastasis.

Cervical degenerative disease is an almost universal concomitant of human aging. Over half of the middle aged population has cervical spondylosis. This condition is often asymptomatic, but in 10% to 15% of the cases, it is associated with, or progresses to, neural compression. Cervical spondylotic radiculopathy is a condition due to a root nerve compression while cervical spondylotic myelopathy is a condition due to a medullar cord compression. Root nerve or medullar cord can be compressed either by a soft disc extrusion or by arthrosis due to a degenerative disc. Anterior cervical discectomy and fusion is the standard surgical treatment of the cervical radiculopathy or cervical myelopathy when non-surgical treatment failed. The aim of this surgery is to provide a neurologic decompression associated to spine stabilization. Decompression is achieved by removal the disc and soft disc extrusion if present. Stabilization is supported by implantation of material in the interbody space like bone or cage with bone substitute. This cage provides a bone fusion matrix and an intervertebral height and stability support at the same time. To enforce the stabilization, a plate can be screwed on the anterior cervical vertebral wall. The HRCC® cage is a stand-alone cage with two rotary blades which penetrate into vertebral bone so there is no need to implant plate. One of the reasons why treatment can fail is the pseudarthrosis that is fusion failure. It mays occur as an increase of axial pain or radicular pain. The aim of this study is to demonstrate similar results on bone fusion in the surgical treatment of cervical radiculopathy or myelopathy with HRCC cage used in anterior cervical discectomy and fusion compared with other technics based on a prospective cohort study and a literature review. As secondary outcomes we will search to correlate pseudarthrosis and quality of life impact, to identify complications and to describe the sagittal balance evolution of the cervical spine. To this end, in the context of standard practices, patients who consult the neurosurgical team of the REIMS University Hospital Center with a diagnosis of a cervical radiculopathy or myelopathy with non-surgical treatment failure needing a one level anterior cervical discectomy and fusion will be proposed to be included during this pre-operative consultation. There will be pre-operative collected data about demographic data, pseudarthrosis risk factors, pre-operative symptomatology, quality of life data and pre-operative imagery data. Per-operative and hospitalization data are collected as well with surgery duration, blood lost, surgical technic, pain measurement and hospitalization duration. Next, follow-up starts with consultations at 6 weeks, 6 months and 12 months and pain, quality of life and classic X-Ray data are collected to be compared with pre-operative data. And Imagery data are collected in order to identify presence or absence of pseudarthrosis with dynamic X-Ray and CT-scan at 6 months and 12 months. A statistical analysis of the data is next performed to found significant results.

Myelopathy describes any neurologic deficit related to the spinal cord. Myelopathy is caused by various pathological states of the human spinal cord, including tumors, inflammatory lesions, spinal cord compression and degenerative myelopathy. Clinically, the diagnosis of myelopathy depends on localization of the neurologic finding to the spinal cord, rather than the brain or peripheral nervous system and then to a particular segment of the spinal cord. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays an essential role in the diagnosis and follow-up of the lesions of the spinal cord using conventional MRI T1- and T2-weighted sequences. Sometimes a studied spinal cord may appear normal on conventional MRI even though patients have symptoms of myelopathy causing a discrepancy between MRI findings and clinical findings. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is an advanced non-invasive MR imaging technique which assesses the microstructural integrity of nerve fiber tracts.

Hypotheses: Decompressive surgery of cervical myelopathy will improve bladder function. Decompressive surgery of cervical myelopathy will improve sexual function.