The persistent controversy over which treatment is the one with the best patient outcome for postoperative pancreatic cancer patients may finally have been settled by a research team at the Institute of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine of National Taiwan University’s College of Public Health.
Pancreatic cancer has been called a silent killer because symptoms rarely occur at the early stage of the disease and, as one of the fastest-spreading cancers, its five-year survival rate is less than 5 percent — the worst survival rate of all cancers.
As 80 percent of pancreatic cancer patients suffer from recurrence, several postoperative adjuvant treatments have been attempted to lower the risk of recurrence. They include taking a single chemotherapy drug — fluorouracil or gemcitabine — undergoing radiation therapy, or having radiation plus fluorouracil or gemcitabine.
Liao Wei-chih (廖偉智), attending physician of internal medicine at NTU Hospital and one of the coauthors of the research article recently published in the medical journal the Lancet Oncology, said that for the past 10 years there has been little consensus on the optimum postoperative adjuvant treatment for resected pancreatic adenocarcinoma, and the contribution of this research is to offer common ground for resolving the debate.
The debate harkens back to the difference in opinion between US and European medical experts on the effectiveness of radiation therapy, Liao said.
“While in the US radiation treatment is the standard of care [to be given along with chemotherapy], in Europe radiation therapy is considered ineffective and potentially harmful,” Liao added.
With the two major fields holding conflicting views, relevant studies undertaken according to respective directives had been inconclusive in terms of providing a guideline for the optimum treatment, as direct comparisons between certain treatments were not possible.
“The analysis method used by the team has made comparisons that were previously unattainable possible,” NTUH internal medicine attending physician and article coauthor Lin Jaw-town (林肇堂) said.
The analysis method used is called Bayesian network meta-analysis, also known as mixed treatment comparison.
“To put it simply, it allows the comparison among treatments A, B and C when [the data at hand are from those] past studies comparing only A with B or B with C,” associate professor of biostatistics Tu Yu-kang (杜裕康) said.
Using the analysis method, the research team found that “chemotherapy with fluorouracil or gemcitabine is the optimum postoperative adjuvant treatment for pancreatic cancer and reduces mortality after surgery by about a third” relative to observation, or no adjuvant treatment, after surgery.
“Radiation treatment plus chemotherapy is less effective in prolonging survival than chemotherapy,” Liao said.
“And it causes more serious side effects as well,” Tu added.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater