This study gives support to the idea of including an easily assessable self-rated health question among standard risk factors of MI.
Three patients were not evaluable by either CA 125 or standard criteria, leaving 40 patients assessable by combined CA 125 and standard criteria.
First-line chemotherapy is the standard treatment option for patients not assessable for surgery.
Ten patients were not assessable for the efficacy analysis: four in the standard arm and six in the experimental arm (see Figure 1 for details).
Patients with measurable or clinically assessable histologically confirmed advanced solid tumours who hade failed to response to standard therapy or for whom no standard therapy was available were elegible for this study.
Similarly, ICA by IFI on primate's tissue, that is not the gold standard method for ICA investigation, but that is hardly assessable on human tissue in real practice, presented, in our series, a much lower sensitivity if compared to the individual antibodies and more to the combination of all the specific autoantibodies.
The study was originally designed to accrue, in a single-stage design, 25 patients assessable for response allowing the CR rate to be estimated with a standard error of ⩽10%.
In one case, in which a tumour stenosis in the proximal rectum hindered a full colonoscopy, the postoperative colonoscopy was used as standard of reference for the colonic segments that were preoperatively not assessable.
Recurrent disease information was assessable in 220 (96%) patients, with a mean time to event of 39.0 months (standard deviation 38.6; range 0 170 months).
The mean ± standard deviation duration of CTD was 6.8 ± 6.6 years (median 4.2 years) for the 64 assessable cases in Group 1. Regardless of the presence or absence of CTD, there was a trend toward lower levels of total protein and various globulin fractions in women with silicone implants.
Although some of these agents may result in reduction in tumour size, and may still be adequately evaluated by standard criteria based on tumour shrinkage or time to progression, most of these novel therapies may not be clinically assessable by conventional approaches (Garrett and Workman, 1999; Gelmon et al, 1999; Hudes, 1999).
