Research progress of integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine in the treatment of advanced gastric cancer.

Gastric cancer (GC) is a malignant tumor originating from the gastric epithelium, and its incidence and mortality rates rank third among all malignant tumors worldwide. It is also one of the most common cancers in China and is treated predominantly by Western medicine in clinical practice. However, with the advancements in medical technology and informatics, the values of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in preventing and treating GC and improving prognosis have increasingly been recognized. According to TCM, clinical manifestations of GC can be divided into Yege (dysphagia), regurgitation, stomach pain, and Zhengxia (abdominal mass). Due to the unbalanced distribution of health care resources in China, most GC patients already have progressive or advanced-stage disease at the first diagnosis. As a result, most GC patients have poor physical function, and surgery or chemotherapy alone will aggravate the impairment to the immune function and seriously affect the quality of life. In contrast, TCM therapies have shown promising efficacy in the management of these patients. Here we review the role of the integrated TCM and Western medicine in treating advanced GC.

XPC gene intron 11 C/A polymorphism is a predictive biomarker for the sensitivity to NP chemotherapy in patients with non-small cell lung cancer.

The fact that intron single nucleotide polymorphisms could regulate gene expression or even alter gene expression levels has been the focus of attention. To study the relationship between the intron 11 C/A single nucleotide polymorphism of XPC gene and the efficacy of vinorelbine and cisplatin (NP) chemotherapy, 164 patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) taking NP chemotherapy drugs were evaluated according to the efficacy of the treatment. We used polymerase chain reaction restriction fragment length polymorphism to examine the C/A polymorphism in the XPC gene intron 11 of the DNA samples extracted from peripheral blood. It was found that the frequency of patients in the effective group with C/C+C/A genotype (37.6%) had significant difference to chemotherapy than that of patients with A/A homozygotes (27.7%) in the same group (P=0.043, odds ratio=2.366, 95% confidence interval=1.026-5.457). Therefore, NSCLC patients with the C/C+C/A genotype are more sensitive to NP treatment than those with the A/A genotype. The XPC gene intron 11 C/A polymorphism may be a predictive biomarker for sensitivity to NP chemotherapy in patients with NSCLC.