Panayiotis Kyzas

George Peat and colleagues review and discuss current approaches to transparency and published debates and concerns about efforts to standardize prognosis research practice, and make five recommendations. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary

Blood glucose as a prognostic factor in traumatic brain injury (drawn using data from [32],[33]). The forest plots shows two random-effects meta-analyses of individual participant data from 6 studies, aiming to establish whether glucose is a prognostic factor of unfavourable six month outcome (defined by a Glasgow Outcome Score of 1, 2 or 3) in pat...

Recommendations of PROGRESS (PROGnosis RESearch Strategy). (DOC)

In the second article in the PROGRESS series on prognostic factor research, Sara Schroter and colleagues discuss the role of prognostic factors in current clinical practice, randomised trials, and developing new interventions, and explain why and how prognostic factor research should be improved.

BACKGROUND: The treatment for mandibular condyle fractures remains controversial. Conservative management (CM) and open reduction/internal fixation (ORIF) are both used, but the evidence to support superiority of one method over the other has not been assessed. METHODS: We performed a meta-analysis of studies comparing CM versus ORIF in patients wi...

Evidence indicates that allogenic packed red blood cell transfusion results in the host's immunomodulation, and is associated with adverse clinical outcomes after surgery. The aim of this study was to test whether allogenic leukocyte-depleted blood transfusion represents a significant risk factor for postoperative morbidity after oral and oropharyn...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether the immunohistochemical expression of p53, p21, p27, cyclin D1, and Ki67 can predict therapy response and survival in patients with oral and oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma treated with preoperative chemoradiation. Biomarker expression was evaluated by immunohistochemistry in formalin-fixed, p...

The use of prophylactic antibiotics in the treatment of mandible fractures is common practice. The evidence supporting this practice has not been formally assessed for quality. The purpose of this study was to evaluate this empirically. Randomized and nonrandomized trials evaluating the possible impact of the prophylactic use of antibiotics in pati...

Our main objective was to apply a standard classification to surgical complications after free flap surgery for reconstructions of the head and neck. We used the modified Clavien-Dindo classification in a cohort of 79 patients who were having reconstructions with jejunal free flaps simultaneously with resections of oral and oropharyngeal cancer. Th...

Positron emission tomography using 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (18F-FDG PET) has been proposed to enhance preoperative assessment of cervical lymph node status in patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). Management is most controversial for patients with a clinically negative (cN0) neck. We aimed to assess the diagnostic accuracy of...

The amount and quality of research evidence in oral and maxillofacial surgery (OMFS) journals have never been evaluated. The current study aims to empirically assess the evidence available in this literature. The main (Database 1) and neighboring (Database 2) journals of OMFS were manually screened over a 3-year period (2004 to 2006). The types and...

We aimed to understand the extent of the pursuit for statistically significant results in the prognostic literature of cancer. We evaluated 340 articles included in prognostic marker meta-analyses (Database 1) and 1575 articles on cancer prognostic markers published in 2005 (Database 2). For each article, we examined whether the abstract reported a...

Issues of reported study quality have not been addressed empirically with large-scale data in the cancer prognostic literature. Eight quality measures pertaining to study design and assay methods (i.e., blinding, prospective versus retrospective design, power calculations, outcomes' definitions, time of enrollment, reporting of variables, assay des...

Endoglin (CD105) is a proliferation-associated protein abundantly expressed in angiogenic endothelial cells. Recent studies revealed that CD105 is intensively expressed in tumor vasculature, whereas intratumoral microvessel density (MVD) determined with the use of antibodies to CD105 has been found to be an important prognostic indicator for the ou...

Estrogen receptor beta (ERbeta) is an important mediator of estrogen function in a variety of tissues. Its expression declines in breast, ovarian, prostatic and colon carcinomas as well as in astrocytic tumours. BAG-1 is a multifunctional protein with an important role in neoplasia and is possibly regulated by estrogen receptors. One of the direct...

Dysadherin is a recently characterized cancer-associated cell membrane glycoprotein that has a crucial role to cell-cell adhesiveness. The aim of this study was to examine dysadherin expression in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). A total of 108 tissue specimens of patients with HNSCC were examined using immunostaining for dysadherin,...

Tumor lymphatic density is evaluated by means of specific lymphatic endothelium markers, and is a potential predictor of clinically meaningful outcomes. There are many claims on the postulated superiority of some of these markers to identify lymphatics, always in the absence of quantitative data. We therefore compared the diagnostic accuracy of the...

Tumor angiogenesis is crucial for both the growth of the primary tumor and the development of metastases. Among the factors causing tumor angiogenesis, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is considered as a leading candidate. We aimed to assess the prognostic significance of VEGF and tumor angiogenesis in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma...

Nonreported and selectively reported information and the use of different definitions may introduce biases in the literature of prognostic factors. We probed these biases in a meta-analysis of a prognostic factor for head and neck squamous cell cancer (HNSCC) mortality that has drawn wide attention--the status of the tumor suppressor protein TP53....

Numerous studies indicate the importance of hypoxia-induced pathway in tumor angiogenesis, but in vivo studies examining the importance of this mechanism in prognosis of patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma present conflicting results. We performed a retrospective analysis of 81 patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma in...

Lymph node metastasis is a frequent reason for adverse clinical outcome in many epithelial neoplasms, including head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. The mechanisms underlying the capability of epithelial neoplasms to metastasize via lymphatic vessels have not yet been fully elucidated. There is great debate about whether cancer cells can metastas...

Vascular endothelial growth factor is a peptide with well-defined actions on the vasculature and fundamental role in tumor angiogenesis. Its action in vascular endothelium is exerted in a paracrine manner. The immunohistochemical expression of this protein by cancer cells in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma was correlated with increased tumor...

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is considered as a prime mediator of angiogenesis. Various studies examining the relationship between VEGF protein overexpression with the clinical outcome in patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma have yielded inconclusive results. We conducted a meta-analysis of 12 studies (n = 1.002 patients...

This Cochrane review summarizes evidence from fifty-seven randomised controlled trials evaluating the effectiveness and safety of benzodiazepines in the treatment of alcohol withdrawal symptoms. The available data show that benzodiazepines are effective against alcohol withdrawal seizures when compared to placebo. However, there are no prominent di...

Recent observations suggest an implication of the cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) in tumor lymphangiogenesis through an upregulation of vascular endothelial growth factor-C expression. It is unknown whether this mechanism also acts in squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck region. We performed a retrospective study of 70 patients with head and neck...

Tumor angiogenesis is associated with tumor progression and aggressiveness in a number of malignancies, and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is considered as a leading candidate in this process. The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of VEGF immunohistochemical expression and tumor angiogenesis in predicting local recurre...

Various studies examining the relationship between tumor suppressor protein TP53 overexpression and/or TP53 gene mutations and the response to chemotherapy and clinical outcome in patients with osteosarcoma have yielded inconclusive results. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the relation of TP53 status with response to chemotherapy a...