Successful reduction of alopecia induced by anthracycline and taxane containing adjuvant chemotherapy in breast cancer - clinical evaluation of sensor-controlled scalp cooling.

BACKGROUND: Scalp cooling is a long known method to reduce chemotherapy-induced alopecia in cancer patients with solid tumors. Due to a progress in this method, a medical device enabling individual feedback-controlled temperature regulation was evaluated. Between June 2011 and December 2012, 83 breast cancer patients were included. Evaluation was focussed on the quantification of alopecia, satisfaction and side effects of the scalp cooling system in (neo-) adjuvant chemotherapy regimens. Alopecia quantification was done by patient evaluation and experts rating. FINDINGS: Based on patient hair loss evaluations, the mean overall success rate of scalp cooling (<50% hair loss) in (neo-) adjuvant chemotherapy was at 52.6%. 51.7% of patients in (neo-) adjuvant CT did not need head covers. In 51.7% of patients in (neo-) adjuvant chemotherapy hair regrowth occurred. Patient satisfaction rate was between VAS 70 and 80 (0-100, where 100 is completely satisfied). CONCLUSION: The evaluation demonstrates that feedback-controlled scalp cooling provides a good chance for breast cancer patients to keep their hair even during (neo-)adjuvant chemotherapies, which are known to cause severe to complete alopecia without scalp cooling.

One-step nucleic acid amplification-a molecular method for the detection of lymph node metastases in breast cancer patients; results of the German study group.

Sentinel lymph node (SN) biopsy is part of the staging procedure in breast cancer patients. In this study, we compared an intraoperative tool named one-step nucleic acid amplification (OSNA) to our routine histological investigation. OSNA consists of a short homogenization step followed by amplification of cytokeratin (CK) 19 mRNA directly from the lysate. To evaluate the performance of OSNA in comparison to histology, analysis of 343 axillary lymph nodes (ALN) from 93 breast cancer patients was performed with both methods. Discordant samples were subjected to other methods. If these tests supported the OSNA results, these samples were excluded from the study. The concordance rate was 91.8%, sensitivity 98.1%, and specificity 90.8% before and 95.5%, 100%, and 95.6%, respectively, after discordant case investigation. Our results show that OSNA is an excellent method for the detection of metastases in lymph nodes and can be applied as an intraoperative diagnostic approach.