[Complications of radical surgery for advanced ovarian cancer]. / Complications de la chirurgie radicale des cancers de l'ovaire de stade avancé

Treatment of advanced ovarian cancer should include surgery with optimal cytoreduction, which is the first prognosis factor. This surgery usually requires extensive resection (pelvic surgery, extensive lymphadenectomy, upper abdominal surgery and sometimes multiple intestinal resection). The complete surgery usually requires a resection of the diaphragm peritoneum in 10 to 100% of cases, intestinal resection in 20 to 100% of cases, splenectomy in 1 to 33% of cases, pancreatectomy in 0 11% of cases, resection of liver metastases in 0 to 16% of cases and cholecystectomy in 2 to 20% of cases. The main complications reported were digestive fistula (1.4 to 8.2%), lymphocyst (0.6 to 32%), septic complications (3.7 to 41.4%) and pulmonary complications (0 to 59%) in case of diaphragmatic surgery. The postoperative mortality ranges from 0.3 to 5.7%. Radical surgery increases the rate of complete cytoreduction with significant morbidity and postoperative mortality. Because these complications decrease survival, it is essential to assess the risk of occurrence of these events to inform patients.

[Clinicopathological and genomics predictors of response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in breast cancer]. / Prédicteurs clinicopathologiques et génomiques de la réponse à la chimiothérapie néoadjuvante dans les cancers du sein.

Breast cancer is a frequent and heterogeneous disease. The choice of systemic treatments such as chemotherapy is based on predicting factors of response that did not much evolve. Preoperative chemotherapy provides an opportunity to directly assess tumor response to therapy. Predictors based on mathematical models could optimize those treatments. To go on this way, three different concepts have been developed to predict the preoperative chemotherapy complete response. Predictors based on clinical and pathological variables are specific of a tumor. They combine into mathematical models variables that have been previously identified as predicting the preoperative chemotherapy complete response. Predictors based on gene expression profile have been developed from groups of patients who received preoperative chemotherapy. They integrate multigene information to predict the tumor behaviour in front of several cytotoxic agents. Those predictors developed for each type of drug characterize the genetic chemoresistance of a tumor. In the same time, predictors of chemosensitivity developed from cell lines of diverse human cancer appeared. The authors established a genetic profile involved into chemoresistance and extrapolated the drug sensitivity for another type of cancer which was not represented, as breast cancer. All those predictors seem interesting but evolution of patients' characteristics and treatments induces a perpetual reassessment to optimize our predictive abilities.

[Risk of breast cancer related to pregnancy]. / Risque de cancer du sein lié à la grossesse.

After a pregnancy, there is a transitory increase in the risk of breast cancer. During the pregnancy, the number of mammary epithelial cells increases massively. This increase seems partly due to the expansion of stem cells and proliferating intermediate cells. This proliferation of epithelial cells is accompanied by angiogenesis and by recruitment of stromal cells, as well as changes of the extracellular matrix. During any pregnancy, there is cell trafficking between mother and foetus. Hematopoietic or mesenchymal foetal stem cells are transferred in maternal circulation and could be used by the tumor as support cells and take part in the tumoral development. The study of the mechanisms of this specific oncogenesis may help to develop chemoprevention strategies.