Volume 50, Issue 9, September 2020

Radical prostatectomy and external beam radiotherapy are recognized as comparable treatment options for localized prostate cancer. This review summarizes the updated evidence on oncological outcomes of surgery versus radiotherapy.

This review covers the definition, epidemiology and therapeutic challenges of rare cancers and describes the establishment of the Rare Cancer Center at the National Cancer Center, Japan.

The advocacy of Advance Care Planning (ACP) is a means to honor patient autonomy. Since most East Asian countries are influenced by the Confucianism and the concept of ``filial piety'', patient autonomy is consequently subordinate to family values and physician authority. The dominance from family members and physicians during a patient's end-of-life decision-making is recognized as a cultural feature in Asia. In order to address this ethical and practical dilemma, the concept of `relational autonomy' and the collectivism paradigm might be ideally used to assist Asian people, especially older adults, to share their preferences on future care and decision-making on certain clinical situations with their families and important others. In this review article, we invited experts in end-of-life care from Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan to briefly report the current status of ACP in each country from policy, legal and clinical perspectives.

In addition to neurological deficits, symptoms were associated with poor QOL in patients with glioma. This study provided the basis on further investigation of usefulness of symptom evaluation on QOL improvement.

In a retrospective analysis of newly diagnosed primary central nervous system lymphoma treated at a single institution, a higher complete response rate was observed in R-MPV in comparison with HD-MTX monotherapy. Furthermore, R-MPV followed by high-dose cytarabine consolidation seemingly bestowed longer survival.

This case-control study showed that cumulative tar exposure is a dose-dependent indicator for lung cancer risk, and low-tar exposure was still associated with increased cancer risk.

Pull-through resection without reconstruction is more effective and less invasive than conventional open approaches for OPC and a particularly useful option in regions where TORS has not yet become widespread.

Our comprehensive meta-analysis of 6171 patients demonstrated that patients with higher tumour mutation burden were associated with a reduction of 43% risk of all-cause mortality and 50% risk of disease progression and a higher response rate.

According to this systematic review, we weakly recommend that drug treatment can be performed irrespective of the tumour location in patients with extra-abdominal desmoid-type fibromatosis.

We performed a systematic review to verify the usefulness of CTNNB1 mutation analysis in the diagnosis of DF. It may be useful for the cases that have difficulty in histopathological diagnosis.

Pulmonary emphysema with a GS of ≥5 points may be a factor that can influence the prognosis of patients with primary lung cancer.

This study provides useful information with which to determine optimal surgical procedures for patients aged ≥80 years. Wedge resection might be an alternative to anatomical resection in such patients.

HAGLROS is a kind of long non-coding RNA. We found knockdown of HAGLROS in non-small cell lung cancer cells remarkably suppressed tumour proliferation, migration and invasion. Our results for the first time demonstrated HAGLROS may serve as a target for new therapies in non-small cell lung cancer.

The prognoses of the patients with pure non-urothelial carcinoma of bladder were worse than those of the patients with pure UC.

A randomized phase III trial has started in order to confirm the clinical effectiveness of sublobar resection for early NSCLC with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis comparing with lobectomy.

We report the first Japanese case of polymerase proofreading-associated polyposis carrying a POLD1 variant.