Currently most use of artificial intelligence (AI) in cancer care has been limited to diagnostics, with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approving nearly 700 medical devices that utilize AI and/or machine learning, the majority of which are used in the fields of radiology and pathology....
Lung cancer incidence overall has been declining in the United States since 1992 and since 2006–2007 for both men and women by 2.7% annually and 1.1%, respectively, and overall mortality rates have declined in both men and women due to smoking cessation efforts and advances in therapy and early...
On October 25, 2023, ASCO announced the launch of its new flagship quality program ASCO Certified™, with the goal of ensuring that every patient with cancer has access to high-quality, patient-centered, coordinated cancer care.1 The program, which officially launched on October 27, 2023, to...
It is widely acknowledged that patients with cancer living in rural areas of the United States face limited access to medical and oncology providers, often have to travel long distances to receive care, and experience obstacles in clinical trial participation—all of which affect quality of care and ...
Findings from the Annual Report to theNation on the Status of Cancer, Part 2: Early Assessment of the COVID-19 Pandemic’s Impact on Cancer Diagnosis show new diagnoses of six major cancer types in the United States fell sharply between March and May 2020, coinciding with the beginning of the...
I have been fascinated with death since I was 3 years old. I remember going to my great-grandfather’s funeral and asking my mother where my great-grandfather was. She said he is in heaven. I asked her if I were going to heaven, too, and she said, “Yes, but not for a long time.” Today, I don’t...
Adults living alone had a 32% higher risk of cancer death than those living with others, according to study results from researchers at the American Cancer Society. For men, the risk was even greater—38%—compared to a 30% higher risk for women. The association between living alone and cancer...
A secondary analysis from the phase III SWOG S0931 EVEREST trial found patients with clear cell renal cell carcinoma at very high risk of recurrence after nephrectomy who received adjuvant everolimus had a statistically significant improvement in recurrence-free survival compared to patients who...
Each year, nearly 16,000 children between the ages of 0 and 19 years are diagnosed with cancer, and more than 85% survive for at least 5 years. Overall, this is a large increase in survivors since the mid-1970s, when the 5-year survival rate was just 58%. Today, approximately 500,000 people in the...
ASCO President Lynn Schuchter, MD, FASCO, has made access to palliative and supportive care among patients with cancer a central focus of her presidential term. Although not all cancer clinicians can be palliative care specialists, because palliative and supportive care are so essential to every...
Clear cell renal cell carcinoma is the most common type of kidney cancer, comprising 80% of all malignant tumors found within the kidney. Although some clear cell renal cell carcinoma tumors are sensitive to immune checkpoint inhibitors, currently, there are no measures to predict whether a tumor...
Although the 5-year survival rate for multiple myeloma has increased over the past 2 decades—from about 35% in 2000 to approximately 62% in 2015—due to more effective therapies, the cancer remains incurable. According to the American Cancer Society, this year, nearly 36,000 individuals will be...
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...
Although the development of new therapies for multiple myeloma has significantly improved response rates and outcomes for patients with the blood cancer, most patients eventually relapse, including those who initially achieved remission. A phase I study is investigating whether a dendritic cell...
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 ...
Racial minority patients are impacted differently by the social and physical characteristics of their environments, which may negatively affect cancer outcomes compared with White patients with cancer, according to a new study by Robinson-Oghogho et al presented during the 16th AACR Conference on...
There have been demonstrated differences in tumor cell metabolism between right-sided and left-sided colorectal tumors, which could explain the differences observed in their clinical behavior, especially in metastatic disease. Now, new research has found that patients with right-sided colorectal...
The Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, Part 2—published by Negoita et al in the journal Cancer—showed that new diagnoses of six major cancer types in the United States fell sharply between March and May of 2020, coinciding with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The six...
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...
According to the American Cancer Society, colorectal cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. In 2023, the disease is expected to cause an estimated 52,550 deaths. Studies show that receiving a clinician recommendation is the strongest and most consistent...
On September 13, during a meeting of the Cancer Cabinet, President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden announced a $240 million investment to accelerate advances in cancer-related projects, with the aim of improving treatments and reducing cancer mortality over the next 25 years. The funding,...
The remarkable progress in medical research—primarily supported by federal investments in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI)—over the past 3 decades, coupled with advances in cancer prevention and early detection, has led to a 33% reduction in cancer...
Lung cancer, both small cell and non–small cell, is the second most common cancer in both men and women in the United States, with about 238,340 new cases diagnosed each year, and the leading cause of cancer-related mortality, accounting for more than 127,000 deaths annually.1 Lung cancer in...
My intuition about my health has served me well over the past 10 years, possibly even saving my life from two serious cancers. In 2013, I was diagnosed with follicular lymphoma. I believe that my awareness of changes in my body led to its early discovery. One evening, after exercising at the gym...
Research shows that the United States’ health-care delivery and financing system is so complex that streamlining administrative costs alone could reduce total health-care spending by 15%. In addition, health insurance payment and medical billing processes are time-consuming and expensive for both...
On August 29, the Biden Administration announced the first 10 prescription medications that will be included in Medicare’s price negotiations with drug manufacturers as the government aims to reduce the financial burden on millions of older Americans and potentially save the Medicare program...
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...
A prospective study in China found that a noninvasive, multitarget stool DNA methylation assay was accurate in the early detection and identification of the tissue of origin of gastrointestinal cancers.1 The study, conducted by Li-Yue Sun, MD, of Guangdong Second Provincial General Hospital,...
A Vietnamese prospective study by Hanh Thi-Hue Nguyen, BS, and Le Son Tran, PhD, both of the Medical Genetics Institute and Gene Solutions, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and colleagues, investigating the feasibility and performance of a circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) analyzing test in the early...
Pancreatic cancer has the poorest 5-year survival rate (12.5%) relative to all other cancers. In 2023, about 64,050 people will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and approximately 50,550 will die of the disease. A retrospective study investigating the impact of palliative care medicine on the...
I knew the moment my fingers found a lump in my left breast, in 2018, that it was cancer, and I wondered if I was going to die. My maternal grandmother had been diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 39, the same age I was when I discovered the mass in my breast. She died 5 years later. Divorced ...
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,...
As we detailed in our Special Report “Surviving, but Not Always Thriving, After Cancer,” in the May 25, 2023, issue of The ASCO Post, the combination of advances in more effective therapies to treat cancer, gains in early detection, and sharp declines in tobacco use have led to a staggering 33%...
With an estimated 4.8 million new cases and 3.4 million deaths worldwide recorded in 2018, cancers of the gastrointestinal tract account for over one-quarter (26%) of global cancer incidence and over one-third (35%) of all cancer-related deaths. Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)...
Studies show that both the incidence of cancer and mortality rates in Vietnam have tripled over the past 3 decades; in 2020, over 182,560 new cases of cancer were diagnosed in the country, and nearly 123,000 people died from the disease. In addition, most cases—up to 80%—are diagnosed at an...
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...
The first sign that pancreatic cancer was stalking my family was in 1982, when my mother was diagnosed with stage IV disease. She was just 54 years old and died several months later. After two more family members in their early 50s were also diagnosed with the cancer, I began to worry that I would...
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 text and photograph here are excerpted from a four-volume series of books titled Oncology: Tumors & Treatment, A Photographic History, The Antiseptic Era 1876–1900 by Stanley B. Burns, MD, FACS, and Elizabeth A. Burns. The photograph appears courtesy of Stanley B. Burns, MD, and The Burns...
The global population is aging rapidly. Currently, there are more than 703 million people worldwide aged 65 and older, representing 9.1% of the global population. It is estimated that this percentage will grow to 15.9%—1.5 billion people—by 2050.1 And with that growing aging population will come...
After a 4-year hiatus because of the COVID-19 pandemic, ASCO’s Breakthrough meeting is returning to Asia from August 3–5, 2023, in Yokohama, Japan, and will also be livestreamed (https://conferences.asco.org/breakthrough/welcome). Launched in 2019 in Bangkok, Thailand, “Breakthrough is ASCO’s...
Jennifer A. Ligibel, MD, FASCO, Director of the Leonard P. Zakim Center for Integrative Therapies and Healthy Living at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues conducted a randomized study to evaluate the impact of a telephone-based ...
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 ...
On December 23, 1971, President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act of 1971 into law, establishing a national cancer program that included the National Cancer Institute (NCI), other research institutes, and federal and nonfederal programs; funding for 15 new cancer research centers and...
On June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to end race-conscious college admissions. In reaction to the Court’s ruling, and its potential effect on reversing progress toward increasing diversity in the nation’s physician workforce, ASCO released the following statement from Chief Executive Officer...
Children of parents with a history of cancer are more likely to face housing and food insecurity and delayed medical care due to a lack of transportation compared to children without a parental history of cancer, according to a study published by Zheng et al in JAMA Network Open. Among these...
A study investigating the effect of Medicaid expansion on racial disparities in mortality among patients with gastrointestinal malignancies has found that the initiative was associated with a greater reduction in 2-year mortality rates among Black patients living in states with Medicaid expansion...
When my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer 25 years ago, her medical team suggested we undergo genetic testing for the BRCA gene mutation. I knew that being a BRCA carrier put me at greater risk for breast and ovarian cancers, but I had no idea it also increased my risk for pancreatic cancer....
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...