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Background and Objectives: Acute myeloid leukemia and myelodysplastic syndrome are both clonal hematologic malignancies that primarily affect older adults. Current treatments for AML/MDS are both limited in number and efficacy. This study aims to evaluate venetoclax-based therapies in AML/MDS, focusing on overall survival and recurrence-free survival rates, and to expand real-world data on its use. Materials and Methods: Clinical and laboratory data on patients with AML/MDS aged 18≥ treated with venetoclax between January 2019 and July 2022 were included. Survival analysis was calculated based on the period from 2019 to December 2023. Results: A total of 161 AML and 40 patients with MDS were included. The median age was 63.53 ± 15.30 years for AML and 70.12 ± 10.21 years for MDS. In both groups, over 55% are male. A total of 77.6% of patients with AML and 75% of patients with MDS received treatment prior to venetoclax. Venetoclax was administered in combination with azacitidine to 84.5% of AML and 67.5% of MDS. The relapse rate in AML is approximately 15%. Overall, the 2-year survival rate is 46% and 18.73 months. The overall CR/CRi rate for patients with AML is 49.1%, while for patients with MDS, it is 50%. The 2-year survival rate for patients with MDS is 52.7%. The 2-year RFS rate was 75.5% for AML and 90.9% for MDS. The relapse rate in AML is approximately 15%. The percentage of adverse events leading to treatment discontinuation among those with grade 3-4 toxicity is low; 26.7% for AML ( n = 43) and 15% for MDS ( n = 6). Conclusions: Our real-world data demonstrate that venetoclax has the potential to improve overall survival rates when used in combination with HMAs and supports its use in patients with AML/MDS.

Objective: Thyroid cancer can be detected in 5-10% of patients with thyroid nodules. Management may be a challenge if fine-needle aspiration biopsy yields Bethesda III findings. Most of these cases undergo surgery and are ultimately found benign. Our aim was to evaluate whether serum osteopontin can accurately estimate thyroid cancer risk in cases with cytologically Bethesda III thyroid nodules and, thereby, decrease the number of unnecessary surgical interventions., Design and Methods: We obtained blood samples of cases with repeated cytologically Bethesda III thyroid nodules before surgery, and followed up the pathology results after thyroidectomy. We evaluated serum osteopontin from 36 patients with papillary thyroid cancer and compared them with 40 benign cases., Results: Serum osteopontin levels in patients with papillary thyroid cancer are significantly higher than in benign cases (mean serum osteopontin: 10.48 ± 3.51 ng/mL vs6.14 ± 2.29 ng/mL, P < 0.001). The area under the receiver operating characteristics curve was 0.851, suggesting that serum osteopontin could have considerable discriminative performance., Conclusions: In our preliminary study, high serum osteopontin levels can predict the risk of papillary thyroid cancer in thyroid nodules with Bethesda III cytology. Further studies are necessary to confirm these findings., Competing Interests: The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest that could be perceived as prejudicing the impartiality of the research reported., (© The author.)