December 2025 – Page 3 – OncWonk – Dr Bier's Oncology Research Reviews

Hyperglycemia during Adjuvant Chemotherapy as a Prognostic Factor in Breast Cancer Patients without Diabetes

December 9, 2025

| Cancer - Breast, Cancers, Chemotherapy

Comment: This study again reinforces that we need to view blood sugar through the lens of oncologic outcome. Hyperglycemia is a driver of cancer recurrence, so modulating sugar intake during chemotherapy is a low-toxicity, low-cost strategy that somehow is still controversial despite all the research supporting it. Since sugar consumption is the primary lever for […]

Simple sugar intake and cancer incidence, cancer mortality and all-cause mortality: A cohort study from the PREDIMED trial

December 7, 2025

| No Comments

| Cancers

🍏Comment: This study, stemming from the PREDIMED trial, suggest that it’s not the total amount of simple sugar that seems to drive cancer risk and mortality in this high-risk population, but the physical form it’s consumed in. It isolates liquid sugars (like those in fruit juice and presumably sugary drinks) as the significant culprits, with a […]

Metformin for the treatment of breast cancer: a scoping review of randomized clinical trials

December 6, 2025

| No Comments

| Cancer - Breast

Comment: This review maps the landscape of metformin trials and ultimately highlights the lack of evidence for its routine use. Only one trial (NCIC CTG MA.32) showed a survival benefit, and strictly within the HER2+ subgroup. Critically, the review lacks a risk-of-bias assessment, complicating the interpretation of smaller ‘positive’ studies. Furthermore, the largest trial reported […]

Standard-dose vs fixed-dose capecitabine in patients with advanced gastrointestinal and metastatic breast cancer.

December 3, 2025

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| Cancer - Breast, Cancer - Colon

Comment: With the caveat that this is an abstract and not the full study, this trial is a crucial validation of the “less is more” principle that come up frequently. The significant improvement in Time to Treatment Failure (TTF) with the Fixed-Dose (7/7) schedule confirms what proponents of metronomic chemotherapy have argued for years: the […]

Radiotherapy after breast-conserving surgery for elderly patients with early-stage breast cancer: A national registry-based study

December 1, 2025

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| Cancer - Breast, Mastectomy-Lumpectomy, Radiation Therapy

Comment: This study complicates the de-escalation narrative we see surrounding radiation for breast cancer. While randomized trials have proven we can omit radiation in low-risk settings, this data suggests that ‘real-world’ safety may be lower than trial safety. This may be because the registry included patients with higher tumor burdens (up to T2/N1) and unmeasured […]