Ricerc@Sapienza

At the beginning of 2020, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) spreads worldwide. Patients with ovarian cancer should be considered at high-risk of developing severe morbidity related to COVID-19. Most of them are diagnosed in advanced stages of disease, and they are fragile. Here, we evaluated the major impact of COVID-19 on patients with ovarian cancer, discussing the effect of the outbreak on medical and surgical treatment.

Treatment of cancer during pregnancy has been extensively studied, but few data are available about the management of women with cancer diagnosed during breastfeeding. Breastfeeding offers many advantages to mothers and their children, but anticancer drugs may pass into human milk and damage infants, whose detoxifying systems are still in development. Thus, knowledge about the excretion of anticancer drugs in breast milk is relevant, because in the absence of data most women stop breastfeeding while receiving (chemo)therapy.

The incidence of glioblastoma (GBM) in the elderly population is slowly increasing in Western countries. Current management includes surgery, radiation therapy (RT) and chemotherapy; however, survival is significantly worse than that observed in younger patients and the optimal treatment in terms of efficacy and safety remains a matter of debate. Surgical resection is often employed as initial treatment for elderly patients with GBM, although the survival benefit is modest.

Letter to the Editor

Background: The goals of neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) are to reduce tumor volume and to offer a prognostic indicator in assessing treatment response. Contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (CE-MRI) is an established method for evaluating response to NAC in patients with breast cancer. Purpose: To validate the role of unenhanced MRI (ue-MRI) compared to CE-MRI for assessing response to NAC in women with breast cancer. Material and Methods: Seventy-one patients with ongoing NAC for breast cancer underwent MRI before, during, and at the end of NAC.

Introduction. Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor in children, but
accounts for only 1% of brain cancers in adults. For standard-risk pediatric medulloblastoma,
current therapy includes craniospinal irradiation (CSI) at reduced doses (23.4 Gy) associated with
chemotherapy. Whereas most same-stage adult patients are still given CSI at 36 Gy, with or
without chemotherapy, we report here on our use of reduced-dose CSI associated with
chemotherapy for older patients. Methods. We gathered non-metastatic patients over 18 years

The aim of the study was to observe the eectiveness of a photo-biomodulation (PBM)
protocol for the prevention of oral mucositis (OM) in patients undergoing allogeneic hematopoietic
stem cell transplantation (aHSCT). A case-control study was conducted on 40 patients undergoing
aHSCT. The patients were divided into two groups; the preventive group (PG) included 20 patients
(7 females and 13 males) who were subjected to intra-oral PBM for five sessions a week, starting one

In treating head and neck cancer (HNC), the objectives are provided for best functional results and minimal risk of serious complications. The choice of appropriate management depends primarily on specific site and stage of primary tumor at diagnosis. Radiation therapy (RT) with or without concomitant chemotherapy represents a classical treatment option. In this review, we provide an update of recent research strategies to counteract the existing damage caused by RT and highlight clinical trials currently in progress.

Psychological distress is a common consequence of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment and could further exacerbate therapy side effects. Interventions increasing treatment tolerance are crucial to improve both patients' quality of life and adherence to therapies. Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as an effective distraction tool for different medical procedures. Here, we assessed the efficacy of immersive and interactive VR in alleviating chemotherapy-related psychological distress in a cohort of Italian breast cancer patients, also comparing its effects with those of music therapy (MT).

Objectives: This review aims to provide a framework for evaluating the utility of virtual reality (VR) as a distraction intervention to alleviate pain and distress during medical procedures. We first describe the theoretical bases underlying the VR analgesic and anxiolytic effects and define the main factors contributing to its efficacy, which largely emerged from studies on healthy volunteers.