A research team jointly founded by the Taipei Veterans General Hospital and the National Yang Ming University yesterday announced a significant breakthrough in predicting the tumor recurrence and patient survival rates for lung adenocarcinoma, the third-most commonly diagnosed cancer and the leading cause of cancer death in Taiwan.
After analyzing the post-surgical conditions of 573 of the lung adenocarcinoma patients who were treated at the hospital between 2004 and 2010, the Jung Yang Lung Cancer Research Team discovered the predictive value of a classification system for the cancer designed by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer, the American Thoracic Society and the European Respiratory Society in 2011.
The classification system categorizes the histological patterns of the cancer into five types: lepidic, acinar, papillary, micropapillary and solid.
The research team found that of the 573 patients analyzed, 186, or 32.5 percent, experienced a recurrence.
A further analysis of the follow-up of the patients led the team to discover that people whose tumors are of solid or micropapillary types (group A) are more susceptible to recurrence within two years after surgeries than those whose tumors have a lepidic, acinar or papillary component (group B).
On average, patients in group A have a survival rate of only 55 percent after surgery, compared with an 84 percent rate enjoyed by people in group B.
Additionally, the former have a 61 percent chance of seeing their cancer cells spread outside the chest cavity after experiencing a recurrence, while the latter face only a 39 percent risk, the team found.
The team’s discovery was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology on May 5.
Taipei Veterans General Hospital’s Division of Thoracic Surgery Head Hsu Wen-hu (許文虎) said the finding had great significance for the medical community, as it would help doctors choose the most suitable course of treatment for their patients and better predict their risk of recurrence and death.
A number of high-profile political and entertainment figures have been diagnosed with the cancer, including former vice president Vincent Siew (蕭萬長), late Taiwanese pop diva Fong Fei-fei (鳳飛飛) and late TV personality Kung Huang ching-liang (龔黃錦涼), who was better known by her stage name “Aunt Wen Ing” (文英阿姨).
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:
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