New Test Helps Evaluate Breast Cancer Patients for Herceptin Use (HealthDay)

TUESDAY, June 14 (HealthDay News) -- A genetic test to help doctors evaluate whether women with breast cancer are candidates for treatment with the drug Herceptin (trastuzumab) has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The Inform Dual ISH test measures whether there are excessive copies of the HER2 gene in breast tumor tissue. HER2-positive breast cancer is a fast-growing, aggressive form of the disease, making up about 20 percent of all breast cancer cases, the FDA said in a news release. Women with an above-normal number of copies of the HER2 gene are candidates for Herceptin therapy.

Clinical studies involving 510 women with breast cancer showed the new test was 96 percent accurate in identifying HER2-positive tumor samples, the agency said. The test correctly identified HER2-negative tumors in 92.3 percent of cases.

Breast cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer deaths among women, the FDA said, citing some 207,090 cases diagnosed in the United States last year, and about 39,840 deaths from the disease.

The new test is produced by Ventana Medical Systems, based in Tucson, Ariz.

More information

The U.S. National Institutes of Health has more about breast cancer.

Chemo for Late-Stage Cancer Patients May Be Unjustified (HealthDay)

THURSDAY, June 9 (HealthDay News) -- Some patients with advanced cancer receive drugs that won't help them but could cause them harm, a U.S. study suggests.

University of Chicago researchers analyzed medical and pharmaceutical claims from 1,041 patients with metastatic colon cancer who were treated between January 2007 and June 2010. Of those patients, about one in eight received chemotherapy treatments that weren't supported by evidence from clinical trials or by clinical practice guidelines.

The researchers focused on three specific treatments. One had insufficient data to support its use, one had been shown to be ineffective, and one was not supported by data or a compelling rationale, according to the study.

The treatment with insufficient data involved the use of Avastin (bevacizumab) after a patient's cancer had progressed despite treatment with a combination of the drug and chemotherapy. The treatment shown to be ineffective was Xeloda (capecitabine) after cancer progression while being treated with the same class of drug. The treatment with no compelling rationale was Erbitux (panitumumab/cetuximab) after cancer progression while being treated with similar drugs.

The researchers said the patients who received these treatments were exposed to significant risk without proven benefits at an estimated cost of more than $2 million just for the drugs.

"Patients with advanced cancers that do no respond to standard therapies should either be looking for clinical trials, where there is a chance for benefit, or should have been thinking about shifting toward palliative care," study author Dr. Jonas De Souza, a hematology/oncology fellow, said in a university news release.

"Patients should not face the risks, discomforts and costs of aggressive and often quite toxic chemotherapy with treatment regimens that did not provide a benefit in previous studies," he added.

The study was presented this week at the American Society for Clinical Oncology's annual meeting in Chicago. Experts note that research presented at meetings should be considered preliminary because it has not been subjected to the rigorous scrutiny given to research published in medical journals.

More information

The U.S. National Cancer Institute has more about metastatic cancer.

Longevity of AIDS patients presents new risks: US (AFP)

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Thirty years after the AIDS epidemic first surfaced, more people than ever before in the United States -- more than 1.1 million -- are living with HIV, the Centers for Disease Control said Thursday.

The longevity of AIDS patients is widely attributed to the success of antiretroviral drugs which became widespread in the 1990s, but the rise in cases presents new risks for spreading HIV, the CDC said.

"Currently, more than 1.1 million people in the United States live with HIV, and as this number increases, so does the risk of HIV transmission," said CDC chief Thomas Frieden.

"Today, the most infections are among people under 30 -- a new generation that has never known a time without effective HIV treatments and who may not fully understand the significant health threat HIV poses."

The CDC's latest Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report was issued three decades after its June 5, 1981 edition that described unusual cases of pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma in five young men in Los Angeles.

"This report later was acknowledged as the first published scientific account of what would become known as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)," the CDC said.

According to the most recent figures at the end of 2008, a total of 1,178,350 people in the United States were living with HIV, the CDC said.

About 33.3 million people were living with HIV worldwide at the end of 2009.

Since the epidemic first surfaced, nearly 600,000 people have died of AIDS in the United States, the CDC said.

"Over the last three decades, prevention efforts have helped reduce new infections and treatment advances have allowed people with HIV to live longer, healthier lives," said Frieden.

"But as these improvements have taken place, our nation's collective sense of crisis has waned. Far too many Americans underestimate their risk of infection or believe HIV is no longer a serious health threat, but they must understand that HIV remains an incurable infection."

The number of new AIDS cases reported annually peaked in 1992, with 75,457 that year.

Three years later, in 1995, the United States saw its highest number of deaths in a single year from AIDS -- 50,628.

After that, antiretroviral drugs were introduced and fatalities began to fall, leveling out at an average of 38,279 AIDS diagnoses and 17,489 deaths per year from 1999 to 2008, the CDC said.

In the United States, gay men continue to account for the majority of new cases at more than half of all new infections, mainly among whites.

However, African-American men are disproportionately affected by new HIV infections at a rate of six times that of white men and three times more than Hispanic men.

Among women, HIV is 15 times as common among blacks as it is among whites.