Last September, Jamie H. Von Roenn, MD, left her position as Professor of Medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago to join ASCO as its Senior Director of Education, Science and Professional Development. In her new position, Dr. Von Roenn will provide strategic...
The connection between smoking and lung cancer is universally accepted as scientific fact, and those who choose to smoke are painfully aware of the risk it poses for addiction and subsequent cancer. However, to fully appreciate the significance of the Surgeon General’s report, one must turn back to ...
The tobacco industry has always been a major player in congressional races, especially in Southern tobacco-growing states. Moreover, the industry is notoriously bipartisan in their political donations, and members of both parties have returned the favor by voting for tobacco interests. “The 2014...
On January 11, 2014, the nation commemorated the 50th anniversary of a document that transformed our public health landscape and has saved millions of lives: Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service. This groundbreaking report, which...
Rebecca Miksad, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Attending Physician, Gastrointestinal Medical Oncology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, discussed the findings at the symposium and the potential for immunotherapy in pancreatic cancer....
Overall survival was improved in metastatic pancreatic cancer patients through an innovative immunotherapy strategy in a multicenter study reported at the 2014 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium.1 “This is the first time a randomized study has shown that immunotherapy is effective in pancreatic...
For patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) who are unable to receive anthracycline-containing chemoimmunotherapy because of cardiac comorbidity, a regimen of rituximab (Rituxan), gemcitabine, cyclophosphamide, vincristine, and prednisolone (R-GCVP) “is an active, reasonably...
The combination of nintedanib and docetaxel “is an effective second-line option” for patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who have received previous treatment with one line of platinum-based therapy, according to results from the phase III LUME-Lung 1 study published in The...
City of Hope in Duarte, California, has named Steven T. Rosen, MD, as its first Provost and Chief Scientific Officer. Dr. Rosen will guide the scientific direction of the center’s medical research, treatment, and education. He will also assume directorship of the comprehensive cancer institute,...
The Advanced Practitioner Society for Hematology and Oncology (APSHO) is issuing a call for members to oncology nurse practitioners, physician assistants, clinical nurse specialists, advanced degree nurses, and pharmacists. The Society was launched recently during JADPRO Live, a meeting of the...
As a medical oncologist and palliative care physician, I’ve had the privilege of caring for cancer patients and delivering primary palliative care and symptom control, as well as the chance to care for patients especially referred for complex pain and symptom problems (in secondary and even...
In an analysis reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Fengmin Zhao, MS, PhD, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, and colleagues assessed factors associated with pain severity changes in ambulatory patients with invasive solid tumors (breast, prostate, colon/rectum, or lung) in the Eastern...
If a randomized, controlled trial of therapy for breast cancer was submitted for publication in which 1. The drug being tested was old and ineffective, and 2. prior to randomization, the women underwent a clinical breast examination and the study coordinators knew who had the largest cancers, and...
The recent report from the Canadian National Breast Screening Study (CNBSS)—published in BMJ and reviewed in The ASCO Post, early release online—concluded that annual mammography in women aged 40 to 59 does not result in a reduction in mortality from breast cancer beyond that of physical...
As reported in BMJ by Anthony B. Miller, MD, Professor Emeritus at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, and colleagues, the 25-year follow-up of the Canadian National Breast Screening Study has shown no mortality benefit of annual mammography screening for breast cancer...
Nearly 250 advanced practitioners assembled at the first annual JADPRO Live educational symposium in St. Petersburg, Florida, hosted by the Journal of the Advanced Practitioner in Oncology (JADPRO). Leaders from four prominent oncology organizations championed collaborative practice as not only...
Obinutuzumab (Gazyva) plus chloramubucil outperformed rituximab (Rituxan) plus chlorambucil (Leukeran) as first-line therapy in older patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and comorbidities in the large CLL 11 trial. Final results showed that obinutuzumab/chloramubucil improved overall...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has expanded the approved use of ibrutinib (Imbruvica) for the treatment of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) who have received at least one previous therapy. Ibrutinib, an oral Bruton’s tyrosine kinase inhibitor, was previously granted...
HLA-haploidentical hematopoietic stem cell transplantation can be performed safely, yield good outcomes, and greatly expand the number of patients with hematologic malignancies who can be treated with stem cell transplant, studies presented at the 2013 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual...
Mastectomy is unnecessary in many women with stage IV breast cancer, according to a study from Indian investigators, reported at the 2013 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.1 The study randomly assigned 350 patients with metastatic breast cancer to mastectomy, complete axillary dissection, plus...
In an effort to continue to bring patients and those who care about and for them the most timely, comprehensive cancer information, ASCO’s patient education website, Cancer.Net, has added a new interactive resource—the Cancer.Net Blog (www.cancer.net/blog). “We decided that a blog made sense for...
Michael A. Thompson, MD, PhD, a Medical Oncologist for Aurora Cancer Care and the Medical Director of Early Cancer Research at Aurora Health Care in Wisconsin, has become something of an expert on the Conquer Cancer Foundation. It began in 2006, when he received a Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO...
Amid studies of novel targeted therapies, genetic analyses of tumors, and new ways to approach the treatment of breast cancer, a low-tech study presented at the 2013 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium found that a yearlong exercise program reduced joint pain associated with aromatase inhibitors in ...
Debu Tripathy, MD, Professor of Medicine, Co-Leader of the Women’s Cancer Program, and the Priscilla and Art Ulene Chair in Women’s Cancer at the University of Southern California Norris Cancer Center, Los Angeles, commented on the APT study for The ASCO Post. “In treating early-stage HER2-positive ...
There may be a benefit for treating small HER2-positive tumors—a breast cancer subset for whom treatment recommendations have not been established but for whom there is still risk of recurrence—and this can be done with little toxicity, according to a multicenter study presented at the 2013 San...
More than 650 studies were presented at the 2014 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium, which attracted a multidisciplinary group of more than 3,500 medical, surgical, and radiation oncologists and gastroenterologists. The following briefs highlight a handful of noteworthy studies from the meeting....
As neoadjuvant therapy for rectal cancer, infusional fluorouracil (5-FU) and oral capecitabine achieve similar outcomes, and the addition of oxaliplatin confers no additional benefit, according to the mature results of the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP) R-04 trial,...
Josep M. Llovet, MD, Professor of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, commented on the findings reported by Faivre et al for The ASCO Post. “This is the first time a TGF-β inhibitor has been clinically tested in hepatocellular carcinoma, and the drug has a good safety profile. But this is a ...
Promising efficacy in advanced hepatocellular carcinoma patients was reported for a novel transforming growth factor–beta receptor type 1 (TGF-β1) kinase inhibitor, LY2157299 monohydrate, at the 2014 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium in San Francisco.1 In particular, patients with moderate to...
Irinotecan drug-eluting beads (DEBIRI) given simultaneously with FOLFOX (leucovorin, fluorouracil, oxaliplatin) and bevacizumab (Avastin) in patients with unresectable colorectal liver metastasis improved response rates, increased resectability, and prolonged hepatic progression–free survival in a...
Long-term follow-up of the ALSYMPCA trial showed that radium Ra 223 dichloride (Xofigo) is extremely safe and active in men with castration-resistant prostate cancer and bone metastases. A snapshot of safety data from about 1.5 years after patients’ final radium-223 injection shows minimal...
The explosion of new therapies for metastatic renal cell carcinoma is a welcome advance, but studies have not yet defined optimal sequencing of the newer therapies. According to the phase III SWITCH trial, it matters little whether therapy for metastatic renal cell carcinoma begins with sorafenib...
“Cytoreductive nephrectomy is routinely used in metastatic renal cell carcinoma, but its use is not as firmly established in the targeted therapy era. And its use is not without risk,” said formal discussant of the International Metastatatic Renal Cell Carcinoma Database Consortium (IMDC) trial,...
Prior to the advent of targeted therapy, cytoreductive nephrectomy was associated with a 6-month improvement in overall survival in patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma. With new and better targeted therapies for the disease, the appropriate use of cytoreductive nephrectomy has been...
In January, Congress approved a $1 trillion appropriations bill for the rest of fiscal year 2014. While the new bill includes $29.9 billion for the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—$1 billion above FY2013 levels after sequestration—including $4.9 billion for the National Cancer Institute (NCI),...
Charles Ryan, MD, moderator of the press conference at the Genitourinary Cancers Symposium where the PREVAIL trial data were discussed, emphasized that this study breaks new ground for enzalutamide (Xtandi) in chemotherapy-naive patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. “The...
Encouraging results of the large phase III PREVAIL trial represent another positive milestone for men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. Enzalutamide (Xtandi) improved overall survival by 29% and reduced the risk of radiographic progression of disease by 81% in men who had not...
In the near future, community oncologists will be tasked with helping patients interpret the results of next-generation sequencing of their tumors. Specifically, we will help patients choose an academic center with a phase I targeted therapy program that is a plausible fit for their disease....
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommends against the use of beta-carotene or vitamin E supplementation for the primary prevention of cancer or cardiovascular disease, according to an updated recommendation statement published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. “The USPSTF found...
The epidemiology of the increased incidence of thyroid cancer, which has nearly tripled since 1975, “suggests that it is not an epidemic of disease but rather an epidemic of diagnosis,” Louise Davies, MD, MS, and H. Gilbert Welch, MD, MPH, concluded after analyzing trends in patients diagnosed with ...
“Dietary intake of lycopene was associated with reduced risk of lethal prostate cancer and with a lesser degree of angiogenesis in the tumor,” Ke Zu, MD, of Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, and colleagues concluded after reviewing dietary information and total and lethal prostate cancer...
Analysis of a large cohort of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer who received chemotherapy at academic, private, and community-based oncology practices using the same chemotherapy order entry system showed that “bevacizumab has been more consistently integrated into treatment regimens than...
Mohs surgery can be an effective treatment option for nonmelanoma skin cancer, as well as for more rare but aggressive skin cancers. In addition, Mohs can be particularly helpful to treat patients with skin cancers that have recurred,” Brett M. Coldiron, MD, Clinical Associate Professor of...
The headline, “Patients’ Costs Skyrocket, Specialists’ Incomes Soar,” aptly encapsulates the theme of a recent article in The New York Times,1 part of a series entitled, “Paying Till It Hurts.” “Oncologists benefit from the ability to mark up (and profit from) each dose of chemotherapy they...
March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is committed to boosting public awareness about the importance of screening and treatment for colorectal cancer. Colorectal cancer poses the greatest risk to adults over age 50, and the U.S. Preventive...
The state of Virginia encompasses a vast area of 40,000 square miles and is divided into five regions: the Atlantic Coastal Plain, the Piedmont, the Blue Ridge, the Appalachian Ridge and Valley Region, and the Appalachian Plateau. The diverse geography of the state creates unique challenges for...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology,1 Guy H. Montgomery, PhD, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and colleagues found that an intervention consisting of cognitive-behavioral therapy plus hypnosis produced better control of fatigue than supportive meetings with...
A collaborative multisite study has found that teens and young adults undergoing stem cell transplantation as part of cancer treatment gain coping skills and resilience-related outcomes when participating with a board-certified music therapist in a therapeutic music protocol that includes writing...
Central nervous system (CNS) metastasis is a pervasive problem in the setting of HER2-positive breast cancer. While some patients can be managed easily, others are challenging, said Eric P. Winer, MD, Chief of the Division of Women’s Cancers and the Thompson Senior Investigator for Breast Cancer...
Central nervous system–directed chemotherapy and cranial radiotherapy for childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia or lymphoma have neurotoxic effects. In a study reported in Journal of Clinical Oncology, Ilse Schuitema, MSc, of Leiden University, and colleagues evaluated white matter changes and...