For many years, researchers around the world have been exploring the connections between cancer treatments and the heart—better known as cardio-oncology. However, many oncologists may be less familiar with this emerging field and what they might need to know in terms of heart health to keep their...
An ASCO Rapid Recommendation Update advises oncologists to avoid the use of triple combination therapy for the management of metastatic clear cell renal cell carcinoma (RCC).1 The new guidance, which updates recommendations from the original 2022 guideline, reflects findings from a phase III,...
Researchers have uncovered an increased incidence of certain types of cancer in Sweden following the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident, according to a novel study published by Tondel et al in Environmental Epidemiology. Study Methods and Results The Chernobyl accident in 1986 led to the spread ...
On June 29, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-to-3 decision, essentially overturned affirmative action in college admissions, which had allowed, since 1978, for colleges and universities to consider race as a factor in student admissions.1 The ruling will impact enrollment decisions at public...
Prostate cancer treatment just got a major boost from the PACE trials, which may have established a new standard of care in low- and favorable intermediate-risk disease, according to data presented at the 2023 American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) Annual Meeting.1 The results of the phase ...
Gender diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in medicine has long been acknowledged as more than “the right thing to do,” with clear evidence of benefits in innovation, collaboration, and workplace culture.1 Yet the data continue to showcase challenges in achieving these goals despite women...
The September 2023 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Virtual Plenary presentation of the NATALEE health-related quality-of-life (QOL) findings was discussed by Michail Ignatiadis, MD, PhD, and Stephen R.D. Johnston, MD, PhD. Dr. Ignatiadis is Director of the Breast Medical Oncology...
Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, has been in the field of oncology for more than 2 decades, he and says this is both one of the most exhilarating and challenging times in cancer care. “What excites me the most are the innovations in treatment that are literally transforming the lives of our patients and...
In August 2014, just a few weeks after my 15th birthday, my body began sending me a lot of worrisome signals that life as I knew it would soon be over. The year before, I had developed a hematoma in my right femur, which was resolved with surgery. But now the pain I was experiencing in that leg was ...
In this installment of The ASCO Post’s Living a Full Life series, guest editor Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, spoke with Seema A. Khan, MD, MPH, Professor of Breast Cancer Surgery at Northwestern Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine. Along with her surgical and academic pursuits, Dr. Khan is an active...
Recent developments in surgery and therapeutics are changing the perioperative approach to non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). These advances were discussed at the 2023 Debates and Didactics in Hematology and Oncology conference, sponsored by Emory University, by Jennifer W. Carlisle, MD, Assistant ...
People with intermediate-risk, localized prostate cancer may be treated as effectively using fewer and higher doses of radiation therapy delivered over five treatment sessions as they can with lower doses delivered over several weeks, a new phase III randomized trial suggested. The findings, which...
In the summer of 2012, I was living my dream. At 28 years old, I had gone from an impoverished childhood in South Central Los Angeles to the high life in the city of Los Angeles. Unable to afford to go to college, an after-school program helped launch me into a career in the hospitality industry. I ...
Cancer—and the quest to accelerate more effective treatments and potential cures for all life-threatening diseases—has perhaps shaped the life of financier Michael Milken more than his legendary career on Wall Street. In the early 1970s, Mr. Milken’s mother-in-law was diagnosed with metastatic...
In this installment of The ASCO Post’s Living a Full Life series, guest editor Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, spoke with Benjamin Besse, MD, PhD, Professor of Medical Oncology at Paris-Saclay University, Orsay, France, and lung cancer specialist at Gustave Roussy Cancer Campus, Villejuif. Currently, Dr....
A commercially available artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm may perform comparably to human readers at assessing screening mammograms, according to a recent study published by Chen et al in Radiology. False-positive interpretations on screening mammograms can result in women without cancer...
Several recent studies have shown an increasingly disturbing trend: the incidence of early-onset cancers—those diagnosed in individuals younger than age 50—is on the rise, and not just in the United States but globally as well. Worldwide, in 2019, there were a reported 1.19 million new cases of...
Patients with pancreatic cancer who were treated with the benzodiazepine lorazepam had shorter progression-free survival periods than patients who were not, according to study results published by Cornwell et al in Clinical Cancer Research. In contrast, patients who were treated with the...
Susan M. Love, MD, MBA, a renowned surgeon, author, researcher, and patient advocate who dedicated her life’s work to breast cancer care, died on July 2, 2023, at her home in Los Angeles. The cause of death was recurrent leukemia. She was 75. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on February 9, 1948,...
The statistics are chilling. According to estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers in the fields of health care and social services are five times more likely to suffer from a workplace violence injury than workers overall.1 The Bureau statistics show that the rate of injuries...
Black patients may be 1.6 times more likely to believe medical information presented by a Black speaker than information presented by a White speaker, according to a new study published by Loeb et al in JAMA Network Open. The findings highlight the importance of increasing racial diversity among...
In this installment of The ASCO Post’s Living a Full Life series, guest editor Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, spoke with neurosurgeon Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, MD, FAANS, FACS, the James C. and Sarah K. Kennedy Dean of Research, Monica Flynn Jacoby Chair of Neurologic Surgery, and William J. and Charles...
“I think the NOW trial is a great study,” said Kathleen Moore, MD, MS, the Virginia Kerley Cade Endowed Chair in Cancer Developmental Therapeutics and Professor of Gynecologic Oncology at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, who shared her thoughts on the trial with The ...
When I felt a large mass in my left breast as I was drying off from a shower on Thanksgiving Day, in 2007, I instinctively knew it was cancer. My mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 38, just 7 years older than I was at the time, and died 4 years later. I was 6 when she was...
The implementation of a collaborative program between North American and Mexican medical institutions to achieve sustainable, high-quality care at a public hospital in the United States–Mexico border region for children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) has resulted in significant improvement ...
In this installment of The ASCO Post’s Global Oncology series, guest editor Chandrakanth Are, MBBS, MBA, FRCS, FACS, spoke with Isabel T. Rubio, MD, PhD, Head of Breast Surgical Oncology at Clinica Universidad de Navarra, Madrid. Dr. Rubio is active in many societies and is a founding member and...
My father is deaf. Born deaf, he is now 75 years old. He uses his voice, but he sounds strange to a hearing person when he speaks. He uses lip-reading techniques to communicate. A year ago, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma. We did his oncology itinerary together. My father cannot go alone to...
Researchers have identified seven potential risk factors for early-onset colorectal cancer in male patients and developed a novel risk evaluation model, according to a recent study published by Imperiale et al in Cancer Prevention Research. The findings may help 45- to 49-year-old patients accept...
The formal discussant of the phase II SWOG S1512 trial was Zeynep Eroglu, MD, of the Department of Cutaneous Oncology at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. She congratulated Dr. Kendra and her coauthors for conducting a study in such a rare tumor. “I think we can say desmoplastic melanoma ...
For comments on the phase III DIPLOMA trial, which found outcomes comparable between minimally invasive and open distal pancreatectomy, The ASCO Post interviewed Chandrakanth Are, MBBS, MBA, FRCS, FACS, the Jerald L. & Carolynn J. Varner Professor of Surgical Oncology & Global Health;...
This has been a year of firsts and seconds for Monica M. Bertagnolli, MD, FACS, FASCO. This past October, Dr. Bertagnolli became the 16th Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the first woman and the first clinical trials cooperative group chair to hold that position. Then, 2 months...
Elizabeth M. Jaffee, MD, Deputy Director of The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, Baltimore, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in a place and time she found exhilarating during her early years. “We didn’t have a lot of money—actually, we were poor. But I had a lot of freedom walking around...
In the era of genomics and precision medicine, the role of pathology in diagnosis and cancer management is rapidly evolving. For the past 50 years, from her office at the Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute (NCI), pathologist Elaine S. Jaffe, MD, has been at the forefront of that...
According to Sunil R. Hingorani, MD, PhD, his parents figured heavily on who he became as a person and on his career choices, which ultimately led to his current position as Director of the Pancreatic Cancer Center of Excellence at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine, Omaha. “My father...
Jonathan W. Friedberg, MD, MMSc, Director of the James P. Wilmot Cancer Institute, grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee. While his school friends were attending camp, he spent his summers working on the family farm. “Perhaps the hardest work I’ve ever done was haying on a hot, humid night in July,...
Caroline Robert, MD, PhD, Head of the Dermatology Unit at Gustave Roussy and Co-Director of the Melanoma Research Unit at INSERM 981 Paris-Sud University, was born and reared in Paris. “I didn’t have a vocation for medicine when I was a kid; I wanted to be an archeologist. I’m not from a medical...
Today is the era of the multidisciplinary oncology care approach, cancer staging facilitates precision in documenting disease extent, all of which improved the quality of patient care. However, in the United States, the Rai staging system is still the most commonly used clinical staging system for...
Manali Patel, MD, MPH, Associate Professor of Medicine (Oncology) at Stanford University, grew up in Shelby, a small town in the textile and farming community of Western North Carolina, among mill workers and other blue-collar laborers. The daughter of Indian immigrants, Dr. Patel’s early life was...
The implementation of a collaborative program between North American and Mexican medical institutions to achieve sustainable, high-quality care at a public hospital in the United States–Mexico border region for children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and improve outcomes has resulted in...
With this issue of The ASCO Post, we introduce a new feature, View From the Top: The Future of Cancer Care Delivery, which will explore how leaders in oncology are developing strategies to ensure continued innovative oncology care in an ever-changing health-care environment. In this inaugural...
For this installment of The ASCO Post’s Living a Full Life series, guest editor Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, spoke with Sibylle Loibl, MD, PhD, Chair of the German Breast Group (GBG) and Chief Executive Officer of the GBG Forschungs GmbH. Professor Loibl, Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology ...
Elizabeth A. Morris, MD, Professor and Chair of the Department of Radiology at the University of California Davis, Sacramento, told The ASCO Post that the study by Berger et al addresses an important question. “This is a topic I am kind of passionate about—it addresses the ordering of mammograms...
Carol Aghajanian, MD, Chief of the Gynecologic Medical Oncology Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, commented on the final analysis of NOVA for The ASCO Post. She highlighted the difficulty in truly measuring overall survival in recurrent ovarian cancer. Dr. Aghajanian also ...
In patients with recurrent low-grade serous ovarian cancer, treatment with ribociclib plus letrozole was not only active, but led to outcomes that are comparable to those achieved with current agents—with a particularly striking 19-month duration of response—according to Brian M. Slomovitz, MD,...
In this installment of The ASCO Post’s Global Oncology series, Guest Editor Chandrakanth Are, MBBS, MBA, FRCS, FACS, spoke with Dov Zippel, MD, a surgical oncologist at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer, Israel, where he is Head of the Meirav Breast Center. Dr. Zippel is the current President of ...
Carol Aghajanian, MD, Chief of the Gynecologic Medical Oncology Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, commented on the final analysis of NOVA for The ASCO Post. She highlighted the difficulty in truly measuring overall survival in recurrent ovarian cancer. Dr. Aghajanian also ...
In patients with recurrent low-grade serous ovarian cancer, treatment with ribociclib plus letrozole was not only active, but led to outcomes that are comparable to those achieved with current agents—with a particularly striking 19-month duration of response—according to Brian M. Slomovitz, MD,...
Emergency department (ED) visits by patients with cancer increased by 67.1% between the start of 2012 and the end of 2019, compared with an increase of just 7.5% in cancer incidence, according to a recent study in JAMA Network Open.1 Factors identified as possible explanations for the...
The search for an effective cancer vaccine has been frustrating, but finally there may be light at the end of the tunnel. Adjuvant use of an investigational personalized mRNA vaccine (mRNA-4157) plus the PD-1 inhibitor pembrolizumab improved recurrence-free survival vs pembrolizumab alone in...
“I think the NOW trial is a great study,” said Kathleen Moore, MD, MS, the Virginia Kerley Cade Endowed Chair in Cancer Developmental Therapeutics and Professor of Gynecologic Oncology at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, who shared her thoughts on the trial with...