The impact of chronic illnesses on the use and effectiveness of adjuvant chemotherapy for colon cancer

Abstract

In MRI, the suppression of fat signal is very important for many applications. Multipoint Dixon based water–fat separation methods are commonly used due to its robustness to B0 homogeneity compared with other fat suppression methods, such as spectral fat saturation. The traditional Cartesian k‐space trajectory based multipoint Dixon technique is sensitive to motion, such as pulsatile blood flow, resulting in artifacts that compromise image quality. This work presents a three‐point Dixon water–fat separation method using undersampled BLADE (aka PROPELLER) for motion robustness and speed. A regularized iterative reconstruction method is then proposed for reducing the streaking artifacts coming from undersampling. In this study, the performance of the regularized iterative reconstruction method is first tested by simulations and on MR phantoms. The performance of the proposed technique is then evaluated in vivo by comparing it with conventional fat suppression methods on the human brain and knee. Experiments show that the presented method delivers reliable water–fat separation results. The reconstruction method suppresses streaking artifacts typical for undersampled BLADE acquisition schemes without missing fine structures in the image. Magn Reson Med, 2011. © 2011 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.

Diabetes and cancer (2): evaluating the impact of diabetes on mortality in patients with cancer

“…However, there were no significant differences in other major toxicities, including severe nausea, vomiting, stomatitis, leucopoenia, fever or infection, or grade 3 or greater toxicity for people with and without diabetes (56 vs 57%). A third study of Veterans Administration (VA) patients with colorectal cancer undergoing surgical resection found a higher risk of acute myocardial infarction (p 00.01) and anastomotic complications (p 00.02) in persons with diabetes post-operatively [55]. Finally, a study of 5,330 stage III colon cancer patients from the SEER-Medicare database found that patients with [56].…”

Decision making and quality of life in the treatment of cancer: a review

“…The presence of comorbid illness is rated by physicians as one of the most important issues when considering treatment options [2]. A SEER-Medicare linked database study of 5,330 patients ≥67 years old with stage III colorectal cancer found that patients with preexisting diabetes, congestive heart failure, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were significantly less likely to receive adjuvant chemotherapy [23]. However, those patients with comorbid illness who did receive chemotherapy were just as likely to obtain a survival benefit from treatment.…”

Association of Patient Related Riskfactors With Effectiveness of Palliative Chemotherapy in Cancer Patients

“…For example, patients with severe chronic airways disease are unlikely to tolerate pneumonectomy for lung cancer, but may tolerate treatment that does not affect the lung and patients with severe renal impairment are unlikely to tolerate nephrotoxic chemotherapy but may tolerate other chemotherapy drugs. Several authors have reported that co-morbidity does not increase the frequency or severity of treatment complications in some circumstances [9,10]. In contrast, other studies have reported higher rates of complications among cancer patients with co-morbidity [11,12].…”