A recent New England Journal of Medicine study indicates that post-surgical combination chemotherapy is more effective in patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer than the standard chemotherapy regimen. Researchers in Canada and France administered the combination chemotherapy, a modified FOLFIRINOX regimen, to 238 randomly selected eligible study participants and compared their outcomes to 243 participants receiving the standard post-surgical treatment, gemcitabine. On average, patients in the FOLFIRINOX group had 21.6 months of disease-free survival compared to 12.8 months in the gemcitabine group. In an Oncology Times article, MSK’s Dr. Alice Wei calls the study “practice changing.” The article notes that the chemotherapy regimen is not suitable for all pancreatic cancer patients, and that the combination chemotherapy can have more side effects.

A new study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that when women controlled the level of breast compression during mammography, image quality was not compromised. A French team studied 548 women, 275 of whom had mammography with self compression and 273 had standard mammography. Self-reported pain was lower in those with self compression, who only had an average three millimeter difference in compression compared to those with the standard test. In a Reuters Health report of the study, MSK’s Dr. Deborah Korenstein said that when women control compression, they may have more comfortable tests and be less likely to avoid mammograms in the future.

Researchers from MSK have studied the use of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) to determine the genetic profiles of gliomas (brain tumors). This could replace brain biopsies with minimally invasive lumbar punctures. MSK’s Dr. Ingo Mellinghoff led the study, published in Nature and reported by Forbes.

Researchers found tumor-derived DNA in 42 CSF samples from the 85 adult patients diagnosed with gliomas included in the study. The use of CSF to sequence tumor DNA may someday determine treatment options for patients for whom a brain biopsy is not an option and could help track changes to tumor profiles over time. Further research will need to determine when tumor DNA becomes discoverable in CSF.