This case study looks at 9 patients who developed cardiac metastases, a tricky situation on which very little data is currently available. We hope that by describing 9 cases, this will provide an easily accessible road map for clinicians around the world when this difficult situation arises. In many cases, the combination of limited ‘palliative’ radiation with immune therapy proved beneficial.
Published data for pediatric and young adult patients with Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC) are scarce. Case reports from the United States and Europe suggest that MCC can occur in young persons and may be more aggressive in this setting. We sought to determine the frequency of MCC in pediatric and young adult populations and establish whether MCC is more likely to present at advanced stages in younger people. To minimize referral bias and maximize available data, we used the National Program of Cancer Registries Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (NPCR SEER) database, which captures incident cancer cases in more than 98% of the US population.