Bone Marrow Examination in Small Cell Lung Cancer—When Is It indicated?

Survival in small cell lung cancer in India: Prognostic utility of clinical features, laboratory parameters and response to treatment

“…[7,18,24,30,31] Brain and adrenal metastases were present in 11% and 7% of the patients with extensive disease, respectively and significantly related to survival. [32][33][34][35][36] Importance of number of metastatic sites has also been reported, [19,29,37] however, it was found to be insignificant in our study.…”

“…Such a practice invalidates the usual interpretation attached to a P-value. [18] Univariate analysis was performed using Kaplan-Meier method [19] for survival and log-rank test [20] for comparisons. Variables examined as dichotomous were: Age (<55 years vs. ≥55 years), gender (male vs. female), smoking (non-smoker vs. smoker), stage (limited vs. extensive), KPS (≥70 vs. <70), symptom burden (≤5 vs. >5), SVC obstruction (no vs. yes), brain metastases (no vs. yes), bone metastases (no vs. yes), liver metastases (no vs. yes), adrenal metastases (no vs. yes) and all the lab parameters (<median vs. ≥median).…”

Diagnosis of unknown nonhematological tumors by bone marrow biopsy: a retrospective analysis of 10,112 samples

“…Ellis et al (1964) reported a 1.7% (25/1,445) incidence over 40 years ago but the metastasis-positive patients in their data included those with known primary malignancies. According to a recent report (Fei et al 2006), in conventional bone biopsies using paraYn-embedded specimens (in which the cases with known tumors and BM inWltration by lymphomas were excluded), the BM involvement was 0.31%. (21/7,006).…”

“…We compared the results of the two methods based on the available metastasis incidence data from BM biopsy specimens (Ellis et al 1964;Fei et al 2006).…”

“…Over the past several decades, just two authors (Ellis et al 1964;Fei et al 2006) have reported BM metastatic tumor rates in BM biopsy samples. The results of one of these studies included those from patients with known malignant tumors, whereas the other study, using the paraYn-embedding method, revealed a very low (0.3%) frequency of metastasis in unselected samples.…”