News Details

NCCN Updates Occult Primary Guidelines

JENKINTOWN, Pa., February 26, 2007 — The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) announces important updates to the NCCN Occult Primary Guidelines. The NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology™ are widely recognized and applied as the standard of care in oncology in the United States in both the community and the academic practice settings.

The 2007 version of the guidelines includes two new tables entitled Immunohistochemistry Markers for Unknown Primary Cancers for use in initial evaluation. These tables identify and distinguish between several epithelial malignancies that can be accurately diagnosed using fine-needle aspiration specimens and immunohistochemical analysis.

A Principles of Chemotherapy page has also been added to the guidelines. The panel recommends that chemotherapy should be considered for symptomatic patients with performance status 0-2 or asymptomatic patients with aggressive cancer. The chemotherapy regimens used should be based on the histologic type of cancer. The tables included on the Principles of Chemotherapy page include many new and most commonly used regimens with corresponding references.

NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology are developed and updated through an evidence-based process with explicit review of the scientific evidence by multidisciplinary panels of expert physicians from NCCN Member Institutions. The most recent version of this and all the guidelines are available free of charge at www.nccn.org.