Tag: Cancer Diagnosis

New Research from Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM) Sheds Light on the Prevalence of Heart Attack and Stroke in Diagnosed Cancer Patients

Cancer cells produce substances that “thicken” the blood, so men and women with cancer have a significantly higher risk of developing blood clots. A manifestation of blood clots can be cardiovascular events such as heart attack and stroke. The latest research found that six months after diagnosis, people with cancer had a higher rate of heart attack or stroke.

New research from Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM), published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, found that patients newly diagnosed with cancer are more than twice as likely to suffer from arterial thromboembolism – a sudden interruption of blood flow to an organ or body part due to a clot that has come from another part of the body – as cancer-free patients. The types of cancers studied include breast, lung, prostate, colorectal, bladder, pancreatic and gastric cancer.

Dr. Babak B. Navi, neurologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, and his team evaluated the risk of heart attack and stroke in patients age 66 or older with new cancer diagnoses compared with people who did not have cancer. Results showed that six months after diagnosis, people with cancer had a higher rate of heart attack or stroke (4.7%) due to blood clots than people without cancer (2.2%). After the first six months, the differences in risk got smaller. One year after diagnosis, the risks were about the same in people with and without cancer. Dr. Babak Navi and his team also discovered that more advanced stages of cancer were associated with higher risk.

This research is an outgrowth of the data that Dr. Babak Navi presented at last year’s International Conference on Thrombosis and Hemostasis Issues in Cancer (ICTHIC)  about the risk of heart attacks and stroke in women with breast cancer. Results showed that women diagnosed with breast cancer have a higher risk of a heart attack or stroke in the first year after diagnosis compared to similar women without breast cancer.

Through the latest research, we now know the risk of clotting goes beyond breast cancer and is a risk factor for many different forms of cancer. Further research is needed in order to develop optimal strategies to prevent arterial thromboembolism in patients with cancer.

Weill Cornell Medicine

“People with cancer are known to be at increased risk of blood clots and this risk is believed to vary according to cancer type, stage of disease, and treatment modality. We also know that patients with cancer are more likely to have cardiovascular events which may be induced by tumor or its treatment,” says Dr. Scott Tagawa, medical oncologist and Director of the Weill Cornell Medicine Genitourinary (GU) Oncology Program. “This research further underscores the need to conduct clinical trials to determine the best prevention methods and treatment of thrombosis in patients with cancer.”

Mark your calendars to learn more about the cancer clotting connection at this year’s World Thrombosis Day event.

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Diagnosis Decisions: Is Active Surveillance the Right Prostate Cancer Treatment Choice for You?

jch9011We’re launching a new blog series to help provide some direction to the decision making process that typically follows a cancer diagnosis.

To kick off the series, we sat down with Dr. Jim Hu, one of our internationally-renowned urologists, to determine some of the factors that should go into the decision to pursue active surveillance as a prostate cancer treatment approach.  

A cancer diagnosis typically involves much more than just detecting the presence of cancer in the body. Additional information about the nature of the cancer and where it started and may have spread helps physicians recommend the best course of treatment, especially since depending on cancer type (very low, low, intermediate or high risk), there can be a wide ranging degree of aggressiveness.

For most types of cancers, there are different standards used to “grade” or assess this aggressiveness on a common scale. Usually this information is then used in conjunction with information about whether the cancer has already spread or metastasized to other parts of the body. It can also be used alongside other genetic and molecular information about the cancer that tells us whether this specific cancer is likely to respond to a certain treatment and the rate at which the cancer is likely to spread.

For a long time, prostate cancer has been known as an “indolent” or slow-growing cancer relative to other cancers such as pancreatic or lung cancers. The aggressiveness or rate at which it is likely to grow is measured by studying the appearance of the cancer cells under a microscope to determine the grade. For prostate cancers, we refer to this as the Gleason score. The lowest prostate cancer grade is currently Gleason 3+3=6. Grade 6 prostate cancer is thought to be non-aggressive and unlikely to spread to other places in the body.

However, there are cases when more aggressive cancer may have been hidden and then subsequently discovered. The challenge is that in 75% of cases, prostate cancer is multi-focal, meaning that it grows within several areas of the prostate. This makes it difficult to accurately stage the tumor entirely, as only one section of the cancer is being analyzed to determine its aggressiveness. As a result, the decision to pursue active surveillance or careful monitoring and watching in patients with low-grade tumors on the Gleason scale depends on several factors. These factors include a man’s overall health, life expectancy, the age of diagnosis, and personality type.

The rationale for this approach is that low-risk prostate cancer grows very slowly and some question whether it ever spreads. Therefore the majority of these cancers may not be life threatening within a 10 year time frame, so men can avoid prostate cancer therapies that may affect quality of life. For this group, active surveillance is an alternative to the over-treatment of prostate cancer and potential side effects that can come along with it For example, in men who have numerous medical conditions and a shorter life expectancy, active surveillance is a reasonable treatment option, even with Gleason 3+4=7 prostate cancer, or intermediate risk disease.

With active surveillance, it is important to be monitored regularly by a urologist who will test your PSA levels and perform digital rectal examinations of the prostate. Imaging with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and targeted biopsy of suspicious areas should also be part of the routine to accurately assess prostate cancer severity.

Targeted biopsies use ultrasound fused to the MRI to guide the procedure, greatly increasing the accuracy and likelihood that the tissue sample is of the most suspicious section of the prostate. A guided biopsy takes approximately 10 minutes and carries a small risk of infection or bleeding (like a standard biopsy). Many academic medical centers, including Weill Cornell Medicine/NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital offer targeted biopsies, but many community practices do not. Additionally, there is a learning curve to the procedure, so the experience of the urologist is critical.

There are also biomarkers that have recently been developed to evaluate the need for a prostate biopsy. These include the 4K test and Prostate Health Index (PHI), which are blood tests that assess the likelihood that prostate cancer may be contributing to a rise in PSA level.

Additionally, for men diagnosed with low risk prostate cancer, there are new tests that assess the genetics of the tissue to determine whether more aggressive disease may have been missed on the biopsy, and present in other parts of the prostate. These assays are called Oncotype Dx, Decipher and Polaris.

We offer all of these tests at Weill Cornell and NewYork-Presbyterian, and together they paint a much more complete picture of the prostate cancer and whether it is progressing. This comprehensive, big picture is what we use to make recommendations for your overall course of prostate cancer treatment, including whether it would be a good idea to pursue active surveillance.

Partnering to Detect Prostate Cancer

By Scott Tagawa, M.D.

Prostate cancer comes in many forms. Some tumors, however anxiety producing, are slow-growing tumors and simply require monitoring. And then, there are aggressive tumors that need treatment as soon as possible. Some times these aggressive tumors even spread microscopically prior to surgery or radiation without us knowing. By finding better ways to detect the types of prostate cancers that need to be treated, and as early as possible, we increase our cure rates and the number of people we’re able to treat effectively, while simultaneously minimizing interventions for those who don’t need them.

So where do we begin when it comes to detecting these aggressive tumors? And differentiating them from their less-aggressive counterparts?

Molecular imaging holds many of these answers, particularly for prostate cancer, as it offers a non-invasive way to detect the presence of cancer and distinguish between aggressive and non-aggressive sub-types. At the Weill Cornell Genitourinary (GU) Oncology Program, we’ve had a longstanding expertise in using molecular imaging to better diagnose and treat cancer.

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(Left) A traditional bone scan only shows one small possible site of metastases in the shoulder region of the bone, compared with the molecular imaging scan of the same patient (right) which indicates many metastases throughout the body.

Through our collaboration across multidisciplinary teams and with industry partners, at our academic medical center we have developed several imaging compounds, such as 99Tc-MIP 1404. This is a radiotracer used to more clearly “see” prostate cancer cells through their expression of the prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA). PSMA is a key biomarker in prostate cancer that is present on nearly all tumors. By using this target as a tracer, we can sometimes detect sites of tumors that were not evident on standard types of scans. In addition, the level of PSMA evident in prostate cancer cells can indicate whether the cancer is of a higher grade, more aggressive tumor within the prostate. Our patients were among the first to have received access to this technology. We’re currently leading a clinical trial that is pivotal to the FDA ultimately approving the widespread use of 99Tc-MIP 1404 to detect prostate cancer and help us ultimately determine the best course of treatment.

In part, due to this collaborative work, we were able to recruit the inventor of some of these imaging compounds, Dr. John Babich, to Weill Cornell Medicine in 2013. Collaboration is critical to scientific progress, and we are proud to be building on these accomplishments and forming new strategic partnerships in order to bring scientific discoveries to our patients more quickly than we would be able to if everyone worked in isolation.

It was recently announced that Weill Cornell Medicine has now formed a new research collaboration with Senior Scientific, LLC to investigate using non-radioactive magnetic nanoparticles to detect and diagnose prostate cancer. The combination of molecular nuclear medicine imaging with the magnetic relaxometry (MRX) technology may lead to improvements for many of the thousands of men facing the diagnosis of prostate cancer. We look forward to working with Dr. John Babich to bring MRX technology to our patients and will keep you apprised of research progress.