Men and women may need to be treated differently - at least when it comes to some types of cancer. In an analysis to be presented at the ESMO 2018 Congress in Munich, data was pooled from four UK randomised controlled clinical trials (RCTs) of first line chemotherapy in oesophagogastric (OG) cancer, finding significant differences in a number of important side-effects experienced by male and female patients.
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Study author Dr. Michael Davidson, Royal Marsden Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, London, said: "We have known for a long time in oncology that there are differences between males and females in the incidence and prognosis of many non gender-specific cancers. We are now also beginning to understand some of the complex cellular, molecular and metabolic differences between the two sexes which influence both cancer development and response to treatment. The clinical question we wanted to answer was whether sex influences the toxicity and efficacy of common chemotherapies administered in oesophageal and gastric cancer. It's the first time that gender-differentiated data has been collected on such a large scale for this tumour type."
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The trials selected for this pooled analysis were all evaluating first line chemotherapy regimens for patients with advanced OG cancer. "The four trials we included were large international trials conducted in the UK and Australasia with comparable patient populations and treatments being used," Davidson said. "This allowed us to collate and compare the data." In total 1654 patients were included: 80% were male and 20% were female. A greater proportion of gastric as opposed to junctional or oesophageal cancers were seen in female patients. "These findings are consistent with the incidence and distribution of OG cancers in Western populations," Davidson observed.

Analysis of one week's worth of tweets about breast cancer paints mixed picture of the network's use by individuals and institutions.

Twitter is a place where many cancer patients go to share and discuss their experiences of the disease. This is the main finding of a recent exploratory study, to be presented at the ESMO 2018 Congress in Munich, which analysed the contents of over 6,000 tweets and retweets about breast cancer.

Social media today have become an echo chamber in which every societal issue is reverberated many times over - including cancer. Study author Dr. Rodrigo Sanchez-Bayona of Clinica Universidad de Navarra in Pamplona, Spain, said: "Many of the patients we see in daily practice use social media to search for information about their disease, so, as care providers, we wanted to know what kind of content they find there. At the same time, the sheer volume of posts on Twitter represents a rich pool of data we can use to assess attitudes and discourses surrounding cancer."

For this analysis, all tweets posted with the hashtag #BreastCancer over a seven-day period were collected and categorised according to their content, aim, user information and whether they displayed a stigmatising attitude towards breast cancer. The tweets were also grouped into four subthemes: diagnosis, treatment, prognosis and prevention. "This study was part of a larger, multidisciplinary project to observe the presence of different diseases on social media. In 2014, we found that cancer was the most mentioned pathology on Twitter globally. We decided to look more closely at breast cancer first, because it is one of the three most common tumours worldwide and the primary cause of cancer deaths in women."

The data collected included 3,703 original tweets and 2,638 retweets. "When examining the original tweets, we found that only one in three had medical content," said Sanchez-Bayona. "However, 90% of this medical information was appropriate, which is likely owed to the fact that 40% of tweets came from institutions and public accounts." The categorisation of tweets by aim showed that the most frequent motive was patients sharing their experiences, followed closely by patient advocacy. The most common subtheme by far was prevention (44.5% of tweets).