Case reports and the fight against cancer

There has been a long descriptive history of case reporting in relation to cancer. In his book titled Clinical Case Reporting in Evidence-Based Medicine, Milos Jenicek eloquently describes case reports as the first line of evidence, where everything begins [1]. Some of the earliest case reports describing individual patients afflicted with cancer can be traced all the way back to the papyrus records of Ancient Egyptian medicine of approximately 1600 B.C.. These reports were the first recorded cases of incurable tumors of the breast [2]. Throughout the centuries physicians have continued the practice of writing case reports. Case reports of melanoma were described by Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C. and also by Rufus of Ephesus, a Greek physician, in the first century A.C. [3].Another area where case reporting has provided significant advances in the knowledge of cancer has been in the identification of new types of cancer. For example, in January 1832, Thomas Hodgkin reported six cases to the Medical-Chirurgical Society of London, two of which were what we know today as Hodgkin's lymphoma [4]. In 1957, while in Uganda, Dennis P. Burkitt described a tumor that presented as a growth in the angle of the jaw of African children [5], later to be known as Burkitt's lymphoma. In 1960, Peter Nowell and David Hungerford published a report describing seven patients with chronic myeloid leukemia having the same "minute chromosome" later to be known Philadelphia chromosome [6]. In 1990, Farcet et al. described two patients with a new type of lymphoma, called Hepatosplenic T-Cell lymphoma [7], leading to more focused research of this new entity.On the therapeutic front, the evolution of case reports to describe treatment entities is still evolving. To date the majority of reporting has been about adverse events. For example a case report about a patient with acute myeloid leukemia and nocardiosis revealed that high dose trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole is a direct cause of sig