Friday, September 1, 2017
News Recap:
Not much in the news this last week, unless you take into consideration all the major tragedies that are unfolding: Flooding in Texas, in Ontario, in India; forest fires in BC and Manitoba. Imagine for a moment that you are chronically ill or elderly or both and need to have your medicines refrigerated or you need to have home care or you need dialysis. Oh my God!! How terrible. No power, contaminated water,...
Friday, July 21, 2017
News Recap
1) Vosevi Approved in US – Under Review in Canada
Vosevi has just been approved in the USA to treat adults with chronic HCV genotypes 1-6 without cirrhosis (liver disease) or with mild cirrhosis. Vosevi is a fixed-dose, combination tablet containing sofosbuvir, velpatasvir and a new drug, voxilaprevir. Vosevi is the first treatment approved for patients who have been previously treated with DAAs and failed treatment....
For a long time, patients with intermediate-stage liver cancer, where the tumour is too large to be removed with surgery, had no clear data on which treatment worked best.
One type of treatment directs tiny radioactive spheres to the tumour, while the other is an oral medication - sorafenib - that must be taken as long as the body can bear the side effects.
But after seven years of research, a team from Singapore led by National Cancer Centre Singapore
It's time to pay more attention to liver cancer. Even as breast-cancer, lung-cancer and other cancer fatalities continue to drop, liver cancer is now the fastest-rising cause of U.S. cancer deaths, a recent study shows. Since the mid-1980s, death rates from liver cancer have doubled. An estimated 41,000 new cases and 29,000 liver-cancer deaths are expected in 2017.
Only 1 in 5 patients survive after being diagnosed with liver cancer, the recent study note
Friday, February 10, 2017
News Recap
Liver Cancer
In the news this week was a story about why Toronto, Canada, is a liver cancer hotspot. More than a thousand deaths from liver cancer every year in Ontario — and most of these occur in the Greater Toronto Area. The reasons: Hepatitis B & C in the immigrant populations, and the lack of screening of Baby Boomers in Canada. This is terrible, especially considering that the survival rate from liver ...
Although those with alcohol-induced cirrhosis do not exhibit nearly as high a risk of HCC as those with HCV, further findings indicated that 1.1% of patients with cryptogenic, 3.2% with autoimmune or metabolic disease, and 4% with chronic viral hepatitis developed HCC within 10 years.
In a population-based cohort study published in Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics, researchers from the United Kingdom investigated the overall risk of developing hep
Friday, January 6, 2017
News Recap
Liver Cancer
I guess the subject no one really wants to talk about is liver cancer (HCC), but there were several news items this past week on liver cancer treatments and so I’m going to talk about them.
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is associated with poor prognosis, with around 12% survival at 5 years. Most patients are diagnosed at advanced stages, with tumor portal thrombosis, metastasis, or both (Barcelona ...
The effect of sorafenib on overall survival may depend on the hepatitis status of patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Findings from the Sorafenib Hepatocellular Carcinoma Assessment Randomized Protocol (SHARP) trial led to sorafenib becoming the standard of care for patients with advanced unresectable HCC.
Patients who were both hepatitis B virus (HBV) negative and h
George N. Ioannou, MD, associate professor, VA Puget Sound Health Care System, University of Washington School of Medicine, discusses a study evaluating the effectiveness of direct antiviral agents for hepatitis C virus patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).
The study aimed to understand the real-world effectiveness of antiviral agents sofosbuvir (SOF), ledipasvir/sofosbuvir (LDV/ SOF) and paritaprevir/ritonavir/ombitasvir and dasabuvir (PrOD) by h
Dr. Gonzalez and his team developed a model to determine if it was cost-effective to treat U.S. hepatitis C with all oral direct acting antivirals for HCC patients on the waiting list for liver transplant. The goal was to determine if was more cost-effective to treat pre-transplant or post-transplant. Data related to transition to progression of HCC and progression of disease and the efficacy of antiviral therapy were used for the analysis.
The study foun
