Breast Cancer Screening and Treatment Clinical Trials Updated for 2023.

There are many active or recently completed breast cancer screening and treatment trials in 2023 that have the potential to fundamentally change the way breast radiologists practice medicine. Breast cancer screening trials may provide evidence to support supplemental screening beyond mammography to include US, contrast-enhanced mammography, and breast MRI. Furthermore, there are multiple efforts to support risk-adaptive screening strategies that would personalize screening modalities, frequencies, and ages of initiation. For breast cancer treatment, aims to reduce overtreatment may provide nonsurgical treatment options for women with low-risk breast cancer. Breast radiologists must be familiar with the study designs, major inclusion and exclusion criteria, and principal endpoints in order to determine when and how the study results should influence clinical care. As multidisciplinary team members, breast radiologists will have major roles in the success or failure of these trials as they transition from research to actual clinical practice.

Timeliness of Surveillance Colonoscopy in Underserved Populations: Association with Patient Navigation for Initial Screening Colonoscopy.

Patient navigation (PN) improves initial colorectal cancer (CRC) screening in underserved populations. Whether the impact persists and improves the timeliness of follow-up screening colonoscopy (FSC) is not known. Patients receiving PN at initial colonoscopy between 2010-2011 with findings requiring FSC were matched to unnavigated patients requiring FSC. The primary outcome was proportion of patients with timely FSC, defined as colonoscopy within six months of recommendation. Of 216 patients in the study 103 (48%) completed FSC: 33 of 62 (53%) who received PN compared with 70 of 154 (45%) in the control group (p=.30). After adjusting for insurance, education, language and visits, navigated patients had higher odds (AOR=1.53, 95% CI 0.80-2.92) of timely FSC completion compared with unnavigated patients. Timely FSC completion in underserved patients is low. Patients navigated for initial colonoscopy or not had similar rates of FSC completion. Future studies should investigate navigation for FSC to improve equity in CRC.

An Automated Miniaturized Method to Perform and Analyze Antimicrobial Drug Synergy Assays.

In the light of emerging antibiotic resistance mechanisms found in bacteria throughout the world, discovery of drugs that potentiate the effect of currently available antibiotics remains an important aspect of pharmaceutical research in the 21st century. Well-established clinical tests exist to determine synergy in vitro, but these are only optimal for low-throughput experimentation while leaving analysis of results and interpretation of high-throughput microscale assays poorly standardized. Here, we describe a miniaturized broth microdilution checkerboard assay and data analysis method in 384-well plate format that conforms to the Clinical Laboratory and Standards Institute (CLSI) methods. This method has been automated and developed to rapidly determine the synergism of current antibiotics with various beta-lactamase inhibitors emerging from our antimicrobial research efforts. This technique increases test throughput and integrity of results, and saves test compound and labor. We facilitated the interpretation of results with an automated analysis tool allowing us to rapidly qualify inter- and intraplate robustness, determine efficacy of multiple antibiotics at the same time, and standardize the results of synergy interpretation. This procedure should enhance high-throughput antimicrobial drug discovery and supersedes former techniques.