Purpose. Aromatherapy massage is an alternative treatment in reducing the pain of the cancer patients. This study was to investigate whether aromatherapy massage could improve the pain of the cancer patients. Methods. We searched PubMed and Cochrane Library for relevant randomized controlled trials without language limitations between 1 January 1990 and 31 July 2015 with a priori defined inclusion and exclusion criteria. The search terms included aromatherapy, essential oil, pain, ache, cancer, tumor, and carcinoma. There were 7 studies which met the selection criteria and 3 studies were eventually included among 63 eligible publications. Results. This meta‐analysis included three randomized controlled trials with a total of 278 participants (135 participants in the massage with essential oil group and 143 participants in the control (usual care) group). Compared with the control group, the massage with essential oil group had nonsignificant effect on reducing the pain (standardized mean difference = 0.01; 95% CI [−0.23,0.24]). Conclusion. Aromatherapy massage does not appear to reduce pain of the cancer patients. Further rigorous studies should be conducted with more objective measures.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer and the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in women. The estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) are the important biomarkers in the prognosis of breast cancer, and their expression is used to categorize breast cancer into subtypes. We aimed to analyze the concordance among ER, PR, and HER2 expression levels and breast cancer subtyping results obtained by immunohistochemistry (IHC, for protein) and reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR, for mRNA) and to assess the recurrence-free survival (RFS) of the different subtypes as determined by the two methods. We compared biomarker expression by IHC and RT-PCR in 397 operable breast cancer patients and categorized all patients into luminal, HER2, and triple-negative (TN) subtypes. The concordance of biomarker expression between the two methods was 81.6% (κ = 0.4075) for ER, 87.2% (κ = 0.5647) for PR, and 79.1% (κ = 0.2767) for HER2. The κ-statistic was 0.3624 for the resulting luminal, HER2, and TN subtypes. The probability of 5-year RFS was 0.78 for the luminal subtype versus 0.77 for HER2 and 0.51 for TN, when determined by IHC (P=0.007); and 0.80, 0.71, and 0.61, respectively, when determined by the RT-PCR method (P=0.008). Based on the current evidence, subtyping by RT-PCR performs similar to conventional IHC with regard to the 5-year prognosis. The PCR method may thus provide a complementary means of subtyping when IHC results are ambiguous.

Background: Previous studies showed a higher risk of renal disease among patients with psoriasis; however, this association has been inconsistent. Objectives: This study aimed to carry out a comparison in the probability from suffering renal diseases—including chronic kidney disease (CKD), end-stage renal disease (ESRD), IgA nephropathy (IgAN), glomerular disease (GD), and those resulting in death caused by other renal diseases—in patients with psoriasis. Methods: The systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted to identify cohort studies with reported hazard ratios (HRs) and a 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the renal outcomes among patients with psoriasis. The meta-analysis was analyzed with the random-effects modeling and was further stratified by psoriasis severity. Results: Three studies were included. Compared to controls without psoriasis, patients with psoriasis had increased risks of CKD (HR: 1.53; 95% CI: 1.20–1.96) and ESRD (HR: 1.24, 95% CI: 1.06–1.46). The risks of CKD (HR: 1.91, 95% CI: 1.78–2.05) and ESRD (HR: 2.72, 95% CI: 1.71–4.34) were increased in servere psoriasis patients. Due to substantial heterogeneity across enrolled studies (I ² = 95%), the risk of CKD in mild psoriasis was insignificant (HR: 1.14, 95% CI 0.87–1.48). Two studies identified severe psoriasis were related to higher risks of IgAN and GD, whereas one study found that mild psoriasis was associated with an increased risk of death from renal disease. Conclusion: Patients with severe psoriasis have a higher risk of incident CKD, ESRD, and GD. However, we only identified two cohort studies that compared the risk of IgAN and GD in psoriasis patients to general populations. It is difficult to conclude that severe psoriasis was associated with higher risks of IgAN and GD. For mild psoriasis, the association with renal disease was less consistent.

Background: Several prognostic factors affect the recurrence of breast cancer in patients who undergo mastectomy. Assays of the expression profiles of multiple genes increase the probability of overexpression of certain genes and thus can potentially characterize the risk of metastasis. Methods: We propose a 20-gene classifier for predicting patients with high/low risk of recurrence within 5 years. Gene expression levels from a quantitative PCR assay were used to screen 473 luminal breast cancer patients treated at Taiwan Hospital (positive for estrogen and progesterone receptors, negative for human epidermal growth factor receptor 2). Gene expression scores, along with clinical information (age, tumor stage, and nodal stage), were evaluated for risk prediction. The classifier could correctly predict patients with and without relapse (logistic regression, P<0.05). Results: A Cox proportional hazards regression analysis showed that the 20-gene panel was prognostic with hazard ratios of 5.63 (95% confidence interval 2.77-11.5, univariate) and 5.56 (2.62-11.8, multivariate) for the “genetic” model, and of 8.02 (3.52-18.3, univariate) and 19.8 (5.96-65.87, multivariate) for the “clinicogenetic” model during a 5-year follow-up. Conclusions: The proposed 20-gene classifier can successfully separate the patients into two risk groups, and the two risk group had significantly different relapse rate and prognosis. This 20-gene classifier can provide better estimation of prognosis, which can help physicians to make better personalized treatment plans.

We report a 23- gene-classifier profiled from Asian women, with the primary purpose of assessing its clinical utility towards improved risk stratification for relapse for breast cancer patients from Asian cohorts within 10 years’ following mastectomy. Four hundred and twenty-two breast cancer patients underwent mastectomy and were used to train the classifier on a logistic regression model. A subset of 197 patients were chosen to be entered into the follow-up studies post mastectomy who were examined to determine the patterns of recurrence and survival analysis based on gene expression of the gene classifier, age at diagnosis, tumor stage and lymph node status, over a 5 and 10 years follow-up period. Metastasis to lymph node (N2-N3) with N0 as the reference (N2 vs. N0 hazard ratio: 2.02 (1.05–8.70), N3 vs. N0 hazard ratio: 4.32 (1.41–13.22) for 5 years) and gene expression of the 23-gene panel (P=0.06, 5 years and 0.02, 10 years, log-rank test) were found to have significant discriminatory effects on the risk of relapse (HR (95%CI):2.50 (0.95–6.50)). Furthermore, survival curves for subgroup analysis with N0-N1 and T1-T2 predicted patients with higher risk scores. The study provides robust evidence of the effectiveness of the 23-gene-classifier and could be used to determine the risk of relapse event (locoregional and distant recurrence) in Asian patients, leading to a meaningful reduction in chemotherapy recommendations.