Home Hematology and Oncology MYCN Copy Number Tied to Poor Features in Neuroblastoma

MYCN Copy Number Tied to Poor Features in Neuroblastoma

Patients with MYCN gain had inferior outcomes, including lowest response rate after chemo

MONDAY, July 24, 2017 (HealthDay News) — The rate of unfavorable features is increased in association with increasing MYCN copy number in patients with neuroblastoma, according to a study published online July 11 in Cancer.

Kevin Campbell, M.D., from Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues conducted a retrospective study involving patients with MYCN wild-type tumors, MYCN gain (two- to four-fold increase), or high-level MYCN amplification (MNA; more than four-fold increase). The authors examined ordered associations between MYCN copy number category and features of interest.

The researchers found that 79.1 percent of the 4,672 patients had MYCN wild-type tumors, 2.8 percent had MYCN gain, and 18.1 percent had MNA. The percentage of patients with an unfavorable feature was lowest, intermediate, and highest in the MYCN wild-type, the MYCN gain, and the MNA categories, respectively (P < 0.0001) for each clinical/biological feature, except for 11q aberration, which had the highest rates in the MYCN gain category. Inferior event-free survival and overall survival were seen for patients with MYCN gain compared with MYCN wild-type. MYCN gain correlated with the lowest response rate after chemotherapy among patients with high-risk disease. A significantly increased risk for death was seen among patients with non-stage 4 disease and patients with non-high-risk disease with MYCN gain.

“Increasing MYCN copy number is associated with an increasingly higher rate of unfavorable clinical/biological features, with 11q aberration being an exception,” the authors write.

Abstract
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