THYROID CANCERS

The healthcare community is still awaiting a response from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to the opposition of the agency’s proposal to substantially revise the Medicare Part D protected drug classes.

Overtreating men 70 years or older with prostate cancer cost Medicare more than $1.2 billion from 2004 to 2007, according to the results of a retrospective study using the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results–Medicare linked database.

Lori J. Wirth, MD, discusses the current treatment options for patients with advanced thyroid cancers, in addition to some of the trials that are currently enrolling at her center. She also highlights early data that have been presented for targeted therapies in advanced thyroid cancer.

Lori J. Wirth, MD, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and medical director of the Center for Head and Neck Cancers at Massachusetts General Hospital, discusses how common RET alterations are in thyroid cancers.

Adjuvant external beam radiation therapy was associated with worse overall survival and disease-specific survival in patients with locally invasive papillary thyroid carcinoma, a new retrospective cohort study has found.

Lenvatinib demonstrated promising antitumor activity and a manageable toxicity profile in 3 main subtypes of thyroid cancer, according to findings recently published in <em>Future Oncology.</em>

Jochen H. Lorch, MD,&nbsp;discussed some of the ongoing trials at his institution across various types of thyroid cancer.

Lori J. Wirth, MD, discussed the findings for a small cohort of patients with anaplastic thyroid cancer treated with an anti-PD-1 antibody.

Positive RET staining by immunohistochemistry was associated with a low risk of recurrence and death from papillary thyroid cancer, according to a new exploratory analysis published in <em>Cancer Medicine</em> that examined a cohort of 231 patients with long-term follow up at a single institution.

General Cancer

A prospective, observational study recently published in the&nbsp;<em>European Journal of Cancer&nbsp;</em>helped to clarify the prognostic role of&nbsp;<em>TERT&nbsp;</em>promoter mutations among patients with localized thyroid cancer, revealing that&nbsp;<em>TERT&nbsp;</em>mutations were associated with poor outcomes among patients with nonmetastatic disease that do not have an aggressive histology.

David S. Hong, MD,&nbsp;discusses the use of larotrectinib in patients with thyroid cancer, as well as what is on the horizon with this agent and other TRK inhibitors.