In both DCIS and IDC, hypermethylation was associated with unfavourable characteristics.
In our models, the harm benefit ratio is unfavourable in patients with either favourable prognostic factors or with unfavourable characteristics.
Despite these prognostic unfavourable characteristics, the patient is still alive at the end of follow-up (survival ∼17 years).
The lack of improvement in OS could be correlated to the unfavourable characteristics of the patients, such as the absence of a fluopyrimidine in the chemotherapy regimen.
Similar to other authors (Kabbinavar et al, 2005), we consider that these patients, despite their unfavourable characteristics, may benefit from less-aggressive therapeutic alternatives.
ER-negative tumours correlate with poor tumour differentiation, high proliferation rate and other unfavourable characteristics, and are, in general, considered a more aggressive breast carcinoma.
9 Only patients presenting with cardiogenic shock may be considered for restrictive end-of-life care in connection with other unfavourable characteristics.
Nevertheless, we observed impressive disease stabilizations in a number of patients harboring such unfavourable characteristics, and future work should focus on defining features predicting therapeutic efficacy in such patients.
Thus, T-cell lymphoma had more unfavourable characteristics such as advanced stage at diagnosis, and the 5-year overall survival (OS) rate was significantly lower than B-cell lymphoma (28% versus 71%, P < 0.001).
In selected patients at high risk of bleeding or with anatomically unfavourable characteristics, replacement of a new central venous catheter by guide-wire exchange may be a safe and preferred approach when antimicrobial surface treated catheters are used.
