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Showing 1001 - 1050A Conversation with Craig B. Thompson, MD
In November 2010, Craig B. Thompson, MD, was named President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) in New York, succeeding Harold Varmus, MD, who is now Director of the NCI. A cancer clinician and researcher, before coming to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Dr. Thompson was Director of...
Fighting to Get Back Control
I’ve had raging hormones since I was 18, when I was diagnosed with a benign pituitary adenoma. The tumor caused unpredictable menstrual cycles that remained constant throughout my life, even after it had been successfully treated. So 2 years ago, when I turned 40 and started having sudden bouts of...
A Conversation with Judith Redwing Keyssar, RN
The number of patients seeking hospice and palliative care has grown significantly since 1974, when the NCI funded the first hospice facility in Branford, Connecticut. Nevertheless, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, 85% of Americans still die in hospitals or nursing homes....
Neural Stem Cell Transplantation May Improve Cognitive Function in Brain Cancer
The potentially devastating long-term consequences on cognitive function in patients with brain cancer following cranial irradiation led Charles L. Limoli, PhD, Professor of Radiation Oncology, University of California, Irvine, to study neural stem cell transplantation and how the procedure may...
My Cancer Is Incurable, but My Future Is Limitless
Cancer has nearly always been part of my life. When I was 6 years old, I was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The doctors told my parents that unless I was treated immediately, I wouldn’t live longer than a month. Over the next 3 years, I underwent intensive courses of chemotherapy and...
A Conversation with Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD
Last September, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD, a leading scholar in bioethics and health-care policy, was named the Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor and Vice Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His appointment will be shared between ...
Humor Is Helping Me Survive Cancer
Despite a strong family history of colon cancer—all five of my mother’s siblings had colon cancer, and my mother died of the disease 10 years ago—when some flecks of blood started showing up on my toilet tissue in early 2005, I figured it was from hemorrhoids. At 38, I was a marathon runner and in...
Don’t Take Away Our Hope
After experiencing the loss of my wife Dina’s first pregnancy during her second trimester, we naturally worried that something would go wrong when she became pregnant again. But when our son Will was delivered at full term, we thought we could finally relax. Born at a whopping 10 lb, Will seemed...
Studies Reveal that Hormonal Factors Influence Lung Cancer Risk in Women
In an effort to understand lung cancer risk factors and develop prevention strategies for the disease, Christina S. Baik, MD, MPH, thoracic oncologist and staff scientist at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has examined epidemiologic trends in lung...
First Genomic-based Pediatric Trials Launched in Neuroblastoma
Last November, Dell announced it was donating an initial $4 million including cloud-computing technology to speed up development of personalized medicine trials for children with neuroblastoma and other pediatric cancers. According to the American Cancer Society, about 650 children under the age of ...
Epigenetic Therapy Shows Positive Results in Late-stage Lung Cancer
A small phase I/II clinical study from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found that epigenetic therapy with a combination of azacitidine (Vidaza) and entinostat (an investigational agent) produced responses in some patients with refractory advanced non–small cell lung cancer. The study results, ...
Lung Cancer Advocates Seek to Raise Awareness (and Research Funding)
Although lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States for both men and women—nearly 157,000 deaths from lung cancer occurred in 2011, according to the American Cancer Society—survey results from the Lung Cancer Research Foundation (LCRF) show that 60% of Americans are...
I Never Expected to Get Lung Cancer
When intermittent chest pains sent me to the emergency room nearly a decade ago, I worried that I was having some kind of cardiac event. The ER doctor wanted to make sure that I didn’t have a pulmonary embolism, so in addition to ordering a complete cardiac workup, she also ordered a chest x-ray to ...
Facing the Future without Fear of Breast Cancer Recurrence
A year ago, I was living my dream. Married to a wonderful man, Danny, and with two young children to raise, Karl, 7, and Marcus, 4, I had given up a career in accounting to be a stay-at-home mom. At age 34, I was enjoying life, helping my children with their homework and going to their soccer and...
Surviving Cancer Means Making Many Difficult Decisions
The best advice I received after getting a diagnosis of stage I invasive lobular carcinoma in my left breast was from my radiologist, who told me, “Remember, be your own best advocate.” Those words have stayed with me through my 6-year struggle with breast cancer and its aftermath. Extraordinary...
SIDEBAR: Marking 40 Years of Cancer Progress
It’s been 40 years since President Richard Nixon declared, “The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease,” and later signed into law the National Cancer Act of 1971. Passage...
ASCO’s Blueprint Sets Goals for Accelerating Cancer Progress
ASCO recently issued a report, Accelerating Progress Against Cancer: ASCO’s Blueprint for Transforming Clinical and Translational Cancer Research, which outlines the Society’s 10-year plan for improving cancer outcomes. Central to achieving that goal are three steps, including (1) therapy...
Cancer Does Not Have to Be a Death Sentence
When I found a large amount of blood on my toilet tissue just before Thanksgiving in 2010, I wasn’t too concerned. At just 45 years old, I was in excellent health, and other than the bloody stool I had no other symptoms signaling that something was seriously wrong. My primary care physician thought ...
Quality of Life Is What’s Most Important to Me
For me, getting a cancer diagnosis has been more annoying than frightening. Mainly, I’m annoyed at myself for not taking care of an anal skin tag sooner. (I’d had it since birth.) The growth hadn’t been a problem until I got pregnant with my first child and it became temporarily engorged with...
Novel Agents and Genomic Sequencing Show Promise in Improving Multiple Myeloma Management
For over 30 years, Kenneth C. Anderson, MD, Kraft Family Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center and LeBow Institute for Myeloma Therapeutics at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, has focused his translational research on B-cell ...
Letter to the Editor: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Reconsidered
I read with interest the front-page interview of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel by Jo Cavallo in the December 15, 2011, issue of The ASCO Post. Dr. Emanuel may have had some of the most prestigious positions in all of medicine, but his opinion of the Affordable Care Act is completely misguided. This...
I Refuse to Let Cancer Win
My battle with cancer started with a simple sore throat in June 2005. Despite two rounds of an antibiotic to clear up the problem, within 2 months my throat hurt so much I couldn’t swallow, and a mysterious lump had suddenly appeared on my tongue. By the end of August, I was diagnosed with stage...
Progress in Treating Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Has Led to Across-the-board Improvements in Survival
Four decades ago, Kanti R. Rai, MD, was determined to figure out why some of his patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) died within 2 years after their diagnosis, while others lived for 20 or even 30 years. At the time, Dr. Rai was a young scientist doing research in leukemia at...
SIDEBAR: Obese Children with Cancer May Be at Greater Risk for Cancer Recurrence
A study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncologyin 2008 found that obesity is an important contributing factor to chemotherapy resistance and rising relapse rates in children with leukemia.1 According to the study, obese children diagnosed with leukemia have a 50% higher chance of relapsing...
ASCO Issues New Guideline on Chemotherapy Dosing for Obese Patients
In April, ASCO released a new clinical practice guideline on the appropriate dosing of chemotherapy drugs given to obese adult patients with cancer. The result of an analysis by a panel of experts assembled by ASCO, the guideline calls for the use of a patient's actual body weight when calculating...
Choosing Wisely® Campaign
ASCO recently published a detailed review of the “Top Five” opportunities to improve the quality and value of cancer care by curbing use of common tests and treatments that are not supported by clinical evidence. Published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology,1 the article coincided with the...
ASCO Reexamines the Oncology Workforce Shortage
A study commissioned by ASCO in 2006 predicted a significant shortage of medical and gynecologic oncologists in the United States by 2020. As a result, the organization created the Workforce Implementation Group to develop recommendations to stem the projected workforce shortfall and ensure ongoing ...
SIDEBAR: Success of the Multiple Myeloma Research Consortium
Since its founding in 2004, the Multiple Myeloma Research Consortium (MMRC) has grown from a handful of member institutions to 16 such academic centers and has launched 38 phase I and phase II clinical trials. Six of the drugs studied in those investigations are currently in phase III trials. And...
Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation Initiatives Are Leading to More Effective Targeted Treatment
In 1996, at just 37, the last thing Kathy Giusti expected to hear was that she had the fatal blood cancer multiple myeloma. An executive at Searle Pharmaceuticals and the mother of an 18-month-old daughter, Giusti was told she probably had 3 years to live. At the time, treatments for the disease...
Decoding the Genetic Blueprint of Cancer Cells: Findings in Multiple Myeloma and Breast Cancer
Advances in next-generation DNA sequencing technologies are allowing scientists to decipher the whole genome or whole exome (ie, the coding region of the genome) of cancer specimens more quickly and inexpensively than ever before. And the results are revealing genes that had not previously been...
My Breast Cancer Had Been Coming for Years
I’ve never had a normal mammogram screening. There was always something suspicious the test picked up: macrocalcifications in one breast 1 year and a cyst in the other breast the next year. Over a period of 3 years, I had six tissue biopsies, all benign for cancer. So when I flunked another...
New Study Examines Racial Disparities in Breast Cancer Mortality
According to the first national study looking at racial disparity in breast cancer mortality rates at the city level in the United States, societal factors—especially poverty and residential segregation—are resulting in the unnecessary deaths of five black women every day—more than 1,700 deaths a...
Living with the Aftermath of Breast Cancer
My battle with breast cancer began 10 years ago, but the aftereffects of the disease and the treatment will be with me for the rest of my life. As a professional woman who has had several diverse careers, including one as a corporate controller and another as an art teacher, I’m driven to want to...
New Assessment Tools in Development to Guide Care for Older Patients
More than 1,400 people from 62 countries attended the 2012 Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer/International Society of Oral Oncology (MASCC/ISOO) International Symposium on Supportive Care in Cancer, held in New York last June. One of the featured sessions, which was jointly...
As Conflicting Guidelines Evolve, Experts Continue to Debate the Merits of Cancer Screening
In the 1930s and 1940s, when the American Cancer Society [ACS] first brought forth the message that early cancer detection saves lives, it was a broad brushstroke and an appropriate message. The problem now is that new technology enables us to find [tumors that would never progress to invasive...
Coping with Liver Cancer
From the moment I had a partial hysterectomy in 2010, I started having unexplained bouts of nausea. My surgeon and even my primary care physician chalked it up to everything from the difficult 6-hour surgery I had just had to anxiety over a move I’d recently made from Connecticut to North Carolina. ...
The Science of Resilience: Exploring the Process of Grieving from a New Perspective
How human beings cope with bereavement, loss, extreme adversity, and life-threatening illness has dominated the research interests of George A. Bonanno, PhD, Professor of Clinical Psychology, Teachers College at Columbia University, New York, for more than 20 years. In his book, The Other Side of...
Being Well Informed Helped Me Cope with Breast Cancer
I had been putting off getting a screening mammogram for a few years. When I finally made an appointment in March 2011 and was told that I needed a follow-up sonogram because the test had picked up a suspicious-looking mass in my right breast, I knew I was in trouble. A biopsy of the tumor showed...
A Leading Light in Cancer Advances, Mary Lasker Used Wealth and Connections to Increase Funding for Medical Research
Born in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1900, Mary Woodard Lasker was introduced to the ravages of cancer when she was just 3 or 4 years old and went with her mother to visit the family’s laundress, Mrs. Belter, who had just undergone surgery for breast cancer. On the way over to Mrs. Belter’s home, Ms....
Dying Patients with Cancer Who Avoid Aggressive Care but Stay Connected with an Oncologist Have Better Quality of Life
Dying patients with cancer who avoided hospitalizations and life-prolonging measures, who worried less, prayed or meditated, were visited by a pastor, and maintained a therapeutic alliance with their oncologist had the highest quality of life at the end of life, according to a study recently...
Expert Point of View: Michael Krychman, MD
Like female cancer survivors, men experience high rates of sexual dysfunction following a cancer diagnosis and treatment, especially for prostate cancer, with as many as 90% of men reporting erectile dysfunction after radical prostatectomy and nearly as many suffering with the problem following...
Sexual Dysfunction in Female Cancer Survivors Is Prevalent
Although medical experts put the proportion of female survivors facing some form of sexual dysfunction following a cancer diagnosis and treatment at nearly 100%, very few women raise sexual health concerns with their oncologist. In a study of 261 patients with gynecologic or breast cancer published ...
Starting Over after Cancer Treatment
When bloody discharge started oozing from the nipple on my left breast, I knew instinctively that it was serious. Although I was just 43, having lost two aunts to breast cancer, I knew my family history increased my risk for developing the disease. So when I saw my gynecologist for an exam, I was...
The Language of Cancer
For more than a year, Don S. Dizon, MD, FACP, has been blogging at ASCO Connection (connection.asco.org) about such diverse topics as cancer survivorship, the redesign of clinical studies based on patients’ molecular characteristics, and the power of laughter. Last May, Dr. Dizon tackled the impact ...
Pediatric Pathologist Sidney Farber, MD: The ‘Father of Modern Chemotherapy’ and Cofounder of the Jimmy Fund
In June 3, 1948, The New England Journal of Medicine published a study by Sidney Farber, MD, showing that a synthetic compound, 4-aminopteroylglutamic acid (aminopterin), could induce remissions in seriously ill children with acute leukemia.1 Although the study was small—just 16 children—10 showed...
Feminist Author Babette Rosmond Helped Propel the Adoption of Patients’ Rights to Choose Their Cancer Treatment
Then writer and editor Babette Rosmond was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1971, the second wave of the Women’s Liberation Movement that began in the mid-1960s was in its infancy. Still, when told by her doctor that she would need a radical mastectomy—a procedure developed by William Stewart...
A Series of Medical Missteps
Since the beginning of my symptoms—occasional pain on the upper left side of my abdomen, accompanied at times by nausea—which started nearly 20 years ago, my condition, pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, either remained undetected or was completely misdiagnosed until just recently. A series of...
Novel Drug Combinations Present New Hope for Effective Treatments in Multiple Myeloma
Developing early-phase clinical trials that incorporate combinations of novel agents targeting different pathways in the hematologic cancer multiple myeloma is a leading focus of the work of Sagar Lonial, MD, Professor of Hematology and Vice Chair of Clinical Affairs in the Department of Hematology ...
Surrounded by Breast Cancer
Nine women on my mother’s side of the family have been diagnosed with breast cancer, and nearly half have died from their disease, including my mother. With odds like these, I was determined to do what I could to stay ahead of this dreaded monster I thought was surely coming for me. First Tests...
Highlights From the Ninth International Conference of the Society for Integrative Oncology
The theme of this year’s International Conference of the Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO) was “Honoring Diversity in Cancer Prevention and Control.” The conference was held October 8–10, 2012, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and examined such varied topics as health-care disparities, novel...
