Objective.: To determine the frequency and prognostic value of anemia in cancer patients receiving care at the National Institute of Neoplastic Diseases (Instituto Nacional de Enfermedades Neoplásicas - INEN) between January and April of 2010. Materials and methods.: Anemia was considered for men with hemoglobin levels at <13 g/dL; and for women, at <12 g/dL. Associations between qualitative features were assessed with a Chi-square test. Kaplan-Meier estimator was used for the analysis of the survival curves, and differences between the curves were performed with the log-rank test. Results.: 772 patients were included; 584 (75.7%) had solid tumors and 188 (24.3%) had hematologic malignancies. Anemia was diagnosed in 359 patients (46.5%); hematologic malignancies in 127 patients (67.6%); and solid neoplasms in 235 (40.2%). Hematologic malignancies with the highest frequency of anem...

Advanced breast cancer is an incurable disease, with a median overall survival of 3 years, including in countries without access problems. Although chemotherapy is reserved in some cases, it is still used in many countries as a first-line therapy. The aim of our study is to evaluate the first-line treatment choices and the factors that influence therapeutic decisions. A retrospective analysis was conducted of hormone receptor (+)/HER2 (−) advanced breast cancer patients classified into three groups according to the first-line and second-line treatment received: endocrine therapy–chemotherapy, endocrine therapy–endocrine therapy and chemotherapy–endocrine therapy. Additionally, we explored the overall survival of sequencing therapy groups. First-line chemotherapy was chosen in 34% of patients. Also, around 60% of our patients met the “aggressive disease” criteria from the RIGH...

Introduction: Advanced malignant melanoma is a very aggressive disease, historically with poor prognosis before the new advances with immunotherapy and targeted therapies that have changed the standard of care, especially in cutaneous melanoma. Peru has aggressive features such as higher rates of acral lentiginous melanoma (ALM) subtype with historically shorter survival. Methods: This study describes Peruvian patients with advanced melanoma treated with immunotherapy (nivolumab) in two oncological institutions (public and private), including the discussion of the impact on overall survival (OS) divided by subtype (with incidence in ALM histology) and potential biomarkers that could be related to prognosis. Results: We found that immunotherapy is safe, and improves progression-free survival (PFS), OS and objective response rate (ORR) in our patients, with lower benefit in ALM histology. ...