Selected Articles from This Issue

This study by Lefeuvre and colleagues was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of offering vaginal self-samples or urine self-sampling kits (delivered at home) in reaching under-screened women compared with the conventional invitation letter strategy, and to explore the key factors that might influence women’s participation. Intention-to-treat analysis confirms previous observations from meta-analysis on randomized controlled trials, that directly sending a self-sampling kit to the women’s home address was more effective in reaching women than invitations/reminders to have a regular clinician collected screening sample. The results of the CapU4 trial may generate innovative tools that may help in optimizing cervical cancer screening attendance.The impact of physical activity in patients with cancer treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI), both of which affect outcomes via modulating the immune system, is unclear. Parker and colleagues investigated associations between self-reported, pretreatment physical activity and survival in a series of patients with cancer treated with ICI. This retrospective cohort study included 930 patients treated with ICI who previously reported physical activity and had good performance status at treatment initiation. The results support the hypothesis that physical activity prior to treatment improves survival in patients undergoing ICI. Observational studies incorporating objective measurement and randomized interventional trials are needed to further establish the role of physical activity in improving ICI outcomes.Tobacco smoking drives complex genetic and epigenetic changes in non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), but the interplay between these alterations remains incompletely understood. Using the tracts of homozygosity (TOH) approach in individuals of European descent, Jin and colleagues explored methylation patterns associated with differentially expressed genes in NSCLC due to smoking behavior, integrating the genome-wide TOH, methylome, RNA-seq, and clinical datasets. The study identified significant SNPs associated with smoking behaviors within significant TOH clusters and offers new insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying smoking-induced lung carcinogenesis and progression.Cancer antigen 125 (CA125) is widely recognized as a useful biomarker for the surveillance of patients with ovarian and other cancers. Prior genome-wide association studies have identified variants that influence CA125 levels. Hozaka and colleagues evaluated the utility of stratifying CA125 levels by such variants and evaluated diagnostic performance in control subjects and patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). Results showed that gene variants can be used to generate personalized CA125 reference ranges. This approach did not significantly improve CA125’s diagnostic performance for pancreatic cancer, but it merits evaluation in other diagnostic settings, such as detecting ovarian cancer.