COVID-19 pandemic and impact on cancer clinical trials: An academic medical center perspective.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed health-care operations around the world and has interrupted standard clinical practices as well as created clinical research challenges for cancer patients. Cancer patients are uniquely susceptible to COVID-19 infection and have some of the worst outcomes. Importantly, cancer therapeutics could potentially render cancer patients more susceptible to demise from COVID-19 yet the poor survival outcome of many cancer diagnoses outweighs this risk. In addition, the pandemic has resulted in risks to health-care workers and research staff driving important change in clinical research operations and procedures. Remote telephone and video visits, remote monitoring, electronic capture of signatures and data, and limiting sample collections have allowed the leadership in our institution to ensure the safety of our staff and patients while continuing critical clinical research operations. Here we discuss some of these unique challenges and our response to change that was necessary to continue cancer clinical research; and, the impacts the pandemic has caused including increases in efficiency for our cancer research office.

Family history of cancer in benign brain tumor subtypes versus gliomas.

PURPOSE: Family history is associated with gliomas, but this association has not been established for benign brain tumors. Using information from newly diagnosed primary brain tumor patients, we describe patterns of family cancer histories in patients with benign brain tumors and compare those to patients with gliomas. METHODS: Newly diagnosed primary brain tumor patients were identified as part of the Ohio Brain Tumor Study. Each patient was asked to participate in a telephone interview about personal medical history, family history of cancer, and other exposures. Information was available from 33 acoustic neuroma (65%), 78 meningioma (65%), 49 pituitary adenoma (73.1%), and 152 glioma patients (58.2%). The association between family history of cancer and each subtype was compared with gliomas using unconditional logistic regression models generating odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals. RESULTS: There was no significant difference in family history of cancer between patients with glioma and benign subtypes. CONCLUSION: The results suggest that benign brain tumor may have an association with family history of cancer. More studies are warranted to disentangle the potential genetic and/or environmental causes for these diseases.