A review of the international early recommendations for departments organization and cancer management priorities during the global COVID-19 pandemic: applicability in low- and middle-income countries.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a new virus that has never been identified in humans before. COVID-19 caused at the time of writing of this article, 2.5 million cases of infections in 193 countries with 165,000 deaths, including two-third in Europe. In this context, Oncology Departments of the affected countries had to adapt quickly their health system care and establish new organizations and priorities. Thus, numerous recommendations and therapeutic options have been reported to optimize therapy delivery to patients with chronic disease and cancer. Obviously, while these cancer care recommendations are immediately applicable in Europe, they may not be applicable in certain emerging and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In this review, we aimed to summarize these international guidelines in accordance with cancer types, making a synthesis for daily practice to protect patients, staff and tailor anti-cancer therapy delivery taking into account patients/tumour criteria and tools availability. Thus, we will discuss their applicability in the LMICs with different organizations, limited means and different constraints

Low VHL mRNA Expression is Associated with More Aggressive Tumor Features of Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma

Alterations of the von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) tumor suppressor gene can cause different hereditary tumors associated with VHL syndrome, but the potential role of the VHL gene in papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) has not been characterized. This study set out to investigate the relationship of VHL expression level with clinicopathological features of PTC in an ethnically and geographically homogenous group of 264 patients from Serbia, for the first time. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed a strong correlation between low level of VHL expression and advanced clinical stage (OR55.78, 95% CI 3.17-10.53, P<0.0001), classical papillary morphology of the tumor (OR52.92, 95% CI 1.33-6.44, P=50.008) and multifocality (OR51.96, 95% CI 1.06-3.62, P=50.031). In disease-free survival analysis, low VHL expression had marginal significance (P=50.0502 by the log-rank test) but did not appear to be an independent predictor of the risk for chance of faster recurrence in a proportion hazards model. No somatic mutations or evidence of VHL downregulation via promoter hypermethylation in PTC were found. The results indicate that the decrease of VHL expression associates with tumor progression but the mechanism of downregulation remains to be elucidated

RET oncogene mutations in Serbian patients with thyroid medullary carcinoma

European-Society-of-Human-Genetics European Human Genetics Conference in Conjuction With European Meeting on Psychosocial Aspects of Genetics, May 25-28, 2002, Strasbourg, Franc