Briefs

Apr 26, 2004. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new way of analyzing a cancer patient's situation could give a personalized look ahead at survival and the chance the cancer will come back, U.S. researchers said on Monday. The team at Duke University in North Carolina combined genetic and clinical information for its new analysis, which it hopes could help doctors decide just how aggressively to treat someone's cancer.

"Currently, it is primarily traditional clinical information alone that aids in understanding a patient's risk profile," said Mike West, a professor of statistics and decision sciences at Duke who led the study.

"However, the resulting predictions typically lump patients into broad categories. Access to detailed genomic information now provides the opportunity to move far beyond this -- toward customized risk predictions and prognoses more widely, for the individual patient," West added in a statement.

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