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In a Phase 3 trial including 268 patients with advanced biliary tract cancers, response rates were improved in patients receiving erlotinib with chemotherapy (gemcitabine/oxaliplatin) compared to chemotherapy alone. However, progression-free survival was not enhanced except for the subset with cholangiocarcinoma.
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In this Phase 2 trial, 32 heavily pretreated patients including those who received adjuvant temozolamide, were treated with daily low-dose temozolamide at 50 mg/m2 and twice-weekly Bevacizumab. The treatment was well tolerated with a median progression-free survival of 15.8 weeks and a median overall survival of 37 weeks. However, this was lower than those reported in studies with single-agent bevacizumab and bevacizumab/irinotecan combination.
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A 48-year-old woman, who is 8 years post-hysterectomy for excessive menstrual bleeding, just completed a four-cycle course of chemotherapy (doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide), for a 2.8 cm, high-grade breast cancer with a negative sentinel node biopsy.
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In a retrospective, propensity-score-matched, case-control study, investigators compared clinical outcomes and drug tolerabilities between nafcillin and cefazolin in the treatment of MSSA bacteremia. The authors found that cefazolin was as efficacious as nafcillin in the treatment of MSSA bacteremia while causing fewer adverse drug events.
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This study of 537 hospitals found that those with the lowest mortality rates for acute myocardial infarction have management strategies that differ in important ways from those at hospitals with higher acute myocardial infarction mortality.
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This comprehensive review on postoperative patient handoffs confirms that they are high-risk events associated with adverse patient outcomes, and permits the identification of several strategies likely to improve the process despite the incompleteness and other limitations of the existing literature.
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Institution of a formal audit and feedback program resulted in a decrease in use of broad-spectrum antibiotics and a 31% reduction in cases of Clostridium difficile infection.
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Linezolid was non-inferior to vancomycin in patients with nosocomially acquired MRSA pneumonia. Although mortality was similar among linezolid- and vancomycin-treated patients, several outcomes (such as clinical cure and microbiological cure) favored linezolid.
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This study reports data from the International Collaboration on Endocarditis-Prospective Cohort Study (ICE-PCS) on the clinical characteristics of infective endocarditis related to pacemakers and ICDs. ICE-PCS collected data on 3284 patients with endocarditis from 64 centers in 28 countries in a central database.