| 1. |
- Enblom, Anneli, et al.
(författare)
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A retrospective analysis of the impact of treatments and blood counts on survival and the risk of vascular events during the course of polycythaemia vera
- 2017
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Ingår i: British Journal of Haematology. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 0007-1048 .- 1365-2141. ; 177:5, s. 800-805
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Vascular and non-vascular complications are common in patients with polycythaemia vera. This retrospective study of 217 patients with polycythaemia vera aimed to determine whether blood counts with respect to different treatments influenced the complication rate and survival. We found that 78 (36%) patients suffered from at least one complication during follow-up. Older age and elevated lactate dehydrogenase at diagnosis were found to be risk factors for vascular complications. When the vascular complication occurred, 41% of the patients with a complication had elevated white blood cells (WBC) compared with 20% of patients without a complication (P = 0·042). Patients treated with hydroxycarbamide (HC; also termed hydroxyurea) experienced significantly fewer vascular complications (11%) than patients treated with phlebotomy only (27%) (P = 0·013). We also found a survival advantage for patients treated with HC, when adjusted for age, gender and time period of diagnosis (Hazard ratio for phlebotomy-treated patients compared to HC-treated patients at 5 years was 2·42, 95% confidence interval 1·03-5·72, P = 0·043). Concerning survival and vascular complications, HC-treated patients who needed at least one phlebotomy per year were not significantly different from HC-treated patients with a low phlebotomy requirement. We conclude that complementary phlebotomy in HC-treated patients in order to maintain the haematocrit, is safe.
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| 2. |
- Enblom, Anneli, et al.
(författare)
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High rate of abnormal blood values and vascular complications before diagnosis of myeloproliferative neoplasms
- 2015
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Ingår i: European journal of internal medicine. - : Elsevier. - 0953-6205 .- 1879-0828. ; 26:5, s. 344-347
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Vascular complications occurring before the diagnosis of myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN) in 612 patients from four centers in Sweden, Denmark and France were retrospectively studied.Results: Vascular complications were observed in 151 (25%) of the 612 patients. Of these, 66% occurred during the two years preceding diagnosis. The majority of events were thromboembolic (95%), and included myocardial infarction (n = 46), ischemic stroke (n = 43), transient ischemic attack (TIA) (n = 22), deep vein thrombosis/pulmonary embolism (n = 19), splanchnic vein thrombosis (n = 7), and peripheral embolism (n = 7). Bleeding was observed in only 7 (5%) of the 151 patients with vascular events (3 with intracranial bleeding, 2 with epistaxis and 2 with gastrointestinal bleeding). Full blood counts obtained at least 3 months prior to the MPN diagnosis showed that 269 (44%) had abnormal blood values, fulfilling the diagnostic criteria for MPN. During the time from the abnormal blood test to the diagnosis of MPN, 50 patients suffered from a vascular complication.Conclusion: We therefore conclude that a large proportion of MPN patients suffer severe thromboembolic complications prior to diagnosis. If MPN were diagnosed earlier, a large proportion of these events might be prevented. An MPN should always be suspected and ruled out in patients with unexplained elevated hematocrit, leukocyte and/or platelet counts.
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| 3. |
- Forsare, Carina, et al.
(författare)
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Non-linear transformations of age at diagnosis, tumor size, and number of positive lymph nodes in prediction of clinical outcome in breast cancer
- 2018
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Ingår i: BMC Cancer. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1471-2407. ; 18:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Prognostic factors in breast cancer are often measured on a continuous scale, but categorized for clinical decision-making. The primary aim of this study was to evaluate if accounting for continuous non-linear effects of the three factors age at diagnosis, tumor size, and number of positive lymph nodes improves prognostication. These factors will most likely be included in the management of breast cancer patients also in the future, after an expected implementation of gene expression profiling for adjuvant treatment decision-making. Methods: Four thousand four hundred forty seven and 1132 women with primary breast cancer constituted the derivation and validation set, respectively. Potential non-linear effects on the log hazard of distant recurrences of the three factors were evaluated during 10 years of follow-up. Cox-models of successively increasing complexity: dichotomized predictors, predictors categorized into three or four groups, and predictors transformed using fractional polynomials (FPs) or restricted cubic splines (RCS), were used. Predictive performance was evaluated by Harrell's C-index. Results: Using FP-transformations, non-linear effects were detected for tumor size and number of positive lymph nodes in univariable analyses. For age, non-linear transformations did, however, not improve the model fit significantly compared to the linear identity transformation. As expected, the C-index increased with increasing model complexity for multivariable models including the three factors. By allowing more than one cut-point per factor, the C-index increased from 0.628 to 0.674. The additional gain, as measured by the C-index, when using FP- or RCS-transformations was modest (0.695 and 0.696, respectively). The corresponding C-indices for these four models in the validation set, based on the same transformations and parameter estimates from the derivation set, were 0.675, 0.700, 0.706, and 0.701. Conclusions: Categorization of each factor into three to four groups was found to improve prognostication compared to dichotomization. The additional gain by allowing continuous non-linear effects modeled by FPs or RCS was modest. However, the continuous nature of these transformations has the advantage of making it possible to form risk groups of any size.
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