Clinical outcomes of angiosarcoma:a single institution experience

Dear Editor,Angiosarcoma is a rare malignancy,which accounts for approximately 1%-2%of soft-tissue sarcomas[1].It can occur at any site within the human body.Some research-ers suggested that site distribution may be different between Eastern Asian and Western countries[1].Sev-eral factors,such as age,stage at diagnosis,performance status,site of the disease,histological grade,tumor size,and visceral involvement,were suggested as prognos-tic factors in angiosarcoma[2-5].However,there is still controversy regarding to which prognostic factors are significantly important.As there are no randomized clinical trials for angiosarcoma,its treatments are guided based on guidelines of soft-tissue sarcoma or the results of several retrospective studies.Radical surgery is the preferred treatment for angiosarcoma[2-4].Some stud-ies suggested that receiving adjuvant chemotherapy(CT)is associated with better outcome[5],while other studies have shown that adjuvant CT has no significant effect[6,7].Chemoradiotherapy has been reported to be effective in angiosarcoma especially for cutaneous angiosarcoma[8].However,evidence for the efficacy and safety of pal-liative cytotoxic CT is still limited.Therefore,here,we present our analysis based on the clinical features,tumor characteristics,treatment and outcomes of angiosarcoma patients in an attempt to investigate the significant prog-nostic factors and efficient therapeutics in real clinical practice.

Quality of life outcomes including neuropathy-associated scale from a phase II,multicenter,randomized trial of eribulin plus gemcitabine versus paclitaxel plus gemcitabine as first-line chemotherapy for HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer:Korean Cancer Study Group Trial(KCSG BR13-11)

Background: A phase II clinical trial of the comparison between eribulin plus gemcitabine (EG) and paclitaxel plus gemcitabine (PG) as first-line chemotherapy for patients with metastatic breast cancer (MBC) found that the EG regimen was less neurotoxic, but was similar in efficacy to the PG regimen. In the present study, we analyzed functional assessment of cancer therapy-taxane (FACT-Taxane) questionnaires from patients in this clinical trial to determine their quality of life (QoL). Methods: QoL was assessed using the Korean version of the FACT-Taxane questionnaires. After baseline assessment, QoL was assessed every 2 cycles for 12 cycles and every 3 cycles thereafter. The linear mixed model was used to evaluate the difference in QoL between the EG and PG arms. Results: Of the 118 enrolled patients, 117 responded to the FACT-Taxane questionnaires at baseline, 1 in the PG arm did not. Baseline QoL scores were not different between the EG and PG arms. During treatment, taxane subscale scores were significantly higher in the PG arm than in the EG arm after 2-13 cycles of chemotherapy (all P < 0.05), except for the 11th cycle. Neuropathy-specific analysis showed that patients in the PG arm had earlier and more severe neuropathic symptoms than those in the EG arm (P < 0.001). Conclusions: In our QoL analysis, the EG regimen delayed and decreased neuropathy as compared with the PG regimen. Therefore, eribulin would be a reasonable substitute for paclitaxel as first-line chemotherapy for MBC.