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Showing 2251 - 2300SIDEBAR: Future of PARP Inhibitors in Ovarian Cancer Hangs in Balance
"It’s become clear that the PARP inhibitors in general … are active in this disease, and we are just trying to find out the level of activity and … get to the point hopefully where at least one of these agents will be approved for use” in ovarian and related cancers, commented Jonathan S. Berek,...
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 ...
Expert Point of View: Tim Eisen, MD, and Robert Figlin, MD
Over the past few years, we have gone from famine to feast.… We now have sorafenib [Nexavar] and sunitinib [Sutent], temsirolimus [Torisel], and everolimus [Afinitor], and interferon plus bevacizumab [Avastin] for treatment of metastatic renal cell carcinoma. If these drugs [in COMPARZ] are...
Challenges Persist in Treatment of Elderly Patients with CLL, but Novel Agents Hold Promise for Future Strategies
Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is mainly a disease of the elderly, and the lack of a standard regimen for elderly patients has been a major challenge. The myelosuppressive regimens used to treat younger patients are not well tolerated by the elderly. However, some newer approaches currently...
Study Reveals Global Picture of Obstacles to Pain Control in Patients with Cancer
Hundreds of millions of patients with cancer around the world are suffering from unrelieved cancer pain, despite the availability of morphine and other drugs that could alleviate that suffering. The major barriers are twofold: governments failing to ensure an adequate supply of morphine and other...
Challenging Times: A Day in the Life of a Community Oncologist
Community oncologists man the front line of cancer care, treating upward of 85% of our nation’s patients. Over the past 2 decades, regulatory and economic changes have left many practices in a state of flux and uncertainty, some struggling to keep their doors open. To shed light on the community...
Expert Point of View: Reinhard Dummer, MD
Although the effects of BRAF inhibition were initially unprecedented in patients with BRAF-mutated metastatic melanoma, “the problem is that the effect is not durable,” said formal discussant of this trial, Reinhard Dummer, MD, University Hospital of Zurich, Switzerland. The development of...
SIDEBAR: Randomized Trial of Weight Loss and Cancer Risk Not Feasible
“We have not had a randomized controlled trial of weight loss among people at risk for cancer who don’t yet have the disease, where we can show that weight loss reduces the risk for cancer. And we never will,” Rachel Ballard-Barbash, MD, MPH, told The ASCO Post. “We know from a number of very...
Expect Questions from Patients about Impact of Weight on Prognosis
Increased awareness of the strong association between obesity and higher rates of cancer recurrence and mortality needs to be transmitted from oncologists to patients, but the message needs to concern more than just weight, according to Rachel Ballard-Barbash, MD, MPH, Associate Director of the...
Delivering Affordable Cancer Care: Is It Possible and What Will It Entail?
Many experts agree that at 18% of gross domestic product, health care (to paraphrase Shakespeare) is eating the country out of house and home. “The average cost of treating the most common cancers has increased, and as more expensive targeted therapies and other new technologies become the...
Options Shifting for First-line Treatment of Renal Cell Carcinoma
Trials with pazopanib (Votrient) have “provided significant efficacy, toxicity, and tolerability data for pazopanib to be established as a first-line standard of care” for renal cell carcinoma,” Tim Eisen, PhD, of the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, stated at the 11th International Kidney...
Integrative Medicine Showing Benefits in Cancer Management
Donald I. Abrams, MD, Chief of Hematology-Oncology at San Francisco General Hospital and Integrative Oncologist at the University of California, San Francisco, Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, has been investigating and incorporating integrative medicine approaches in his clinical treatment...
Expert Point of View: John L. Marshall, MD
The pendulum continues to swing in the treatment of stage II and III colon cancer. Not 5 years ago, our party line was that essentially all patients should receive 6 months of adjuvant FOLFOX (leucovorin, fluorouracil [5-FU], oxaliplatin): patients with stage II or III disease, whether rectal or...
SIDEBAR: Mammography Study Stokes Overdiagnosis Debate
Overdiagnosis and the harms associated with unnecessary procedures is becoming a vibrant subject in today’s health-care dialogue, with serious implications for providers and patients alike. A new study from the Norwegian Screening Program concluded that 15% to 25% of breast cancers identified on...
Defining a Cure for Chronic Myeloid Leukemia and Strategies to Achieve this Goal
In chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), continued long-term therapy that prevents both progression to accelerated-phase disease and the emergence of resistance may be thought of as an “operational” or “functional” cure. However, long-term disease control without the requirement for continuous treatment...
MSKCC’s Decision Not to Purchase New Cancer Drug Sparks Editorial and Unprecedented Actions
“At Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, we recently made a decision that should have been a no-brainer: we are not going to give a phenomenally expensive new cancer drug to our patients.” That was the opening sentence of a New York Times op-ed piece written by three physicians from Memorial...
Dr. Jimmie C. Holland’s Research Has Long Underscored the Importance of Caring for the Whole Patient
Although internationally recognized today as the founder of the subspeciality of psycho-oncology, the field of psychiatry held no interest for Jimmie C. Holland, MD, when she entered Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, in the mid-1940s. Born in 1928 at the dawn of the Great Depression,...
Health-care Crisis Reconsidered
As an oncologist in private practice, I usually read with great interest the many articles in The ASCO Post on issues regarding the politics of oncology practice. These articles deal with the major topics of the day, ranging from the high cost of oncologic care to shortages of generic drugs, to...
Ambitious Call to Arms Seeks a Shift in Priorities to Eradicate Cancer
It has been more than 4 decades since our nation loaded its medical cannons and declared war on cancer, self-assured that money and American scientific resolve would lead to victory. But cancer has proved to be a humbling enemy. The war is now fought in targeted skirmishes; the weaponry is a...
SIDEBAR: How Other Countries Are Controlling Oncology Costs
The refrain is familiar: The United States spends more on health care than any other industrialized country, but the investment does not correspond to superior care. A recent study by The Commonwealth Fund, a health-care policy research foundation, shows just how stark the contrast is. Instructive ...
Expert Point of View: Paul Harari, MD
Formal discussant of this trial, Paul Harari, MD, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, commended the N09C6 investigators for conducting a randomized controlled phase III trial on symptom relief. “Most phase III trials are conducted to evaluate a new cancer...
How Sequestration May Affect Cancer Research
Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) began his political career in 1974 as a state representative in Ohio. He served as Ohio’s Secretary of State between 1983 and 1991, went on to serve in the U.S. Congress from 1993 to 2006, and was elected to the Senate in 2006. A supporter of biomedical and cancer...
Fox Chase Researchers Find Most Medicare Patients Wait Weeks before Breast Cancer Surgery
Although patients may feel anxious waiting weeks from the time of their first doctor visit to evaluate their breast until they have breast cancer surgery, new findings from Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia show that these waits are typical in the United States. Results were published...
Gene-expression Profiles of Triple-negative Breast Cancers Differ between African American and Native African Women
Triple-negative breast cancers in African-American women and native African women have differing gene-expression profiles that may have implications for treatment, according to the first study to directly compare tumor gene expression between these populations. Results were reported at the Fifth...
Recognizing and Managing Physician Burnout in Oncology
Although job burnout occurs in all professions, it is more common among physicians, according to a study published recently in Archives of Internal Medicine.1 Physicians on the front line of care, such as those working in emergency rooms or in family medicine, experience the highest rates of...
I’m Not the Same Person I Was before Cancer
It’s not clear to me—and my doctors can’t say with any certainty—whether taking birth control pills for many years had anything to do with my getting breast cancer 3 years ago, at age 44. But the cancer growing in my left breast was diagnosed as stage I, estrogen receptor–positive. Although I never ...
Never a Dull Moment: A Day in the Life of an Oncology Fellow
Oncology fellows represent the future of cancer care, bringing the best and brightest young doctors into a rigorous training environment that molds their future career paths. Due to an impending workforce shortage in cancer care, the public health-care demands placed on today’s oncology fellows...
Give Your Patients the Latest GI Research News
During the upcoming Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium, to be held on January 24–26, direct your patients to www.cancer.net/gisymposium, where they can get research highlights from the 2013 Symposium. Also, your patients can download or listen to podcasts with ASCO experts explaining what this...
Developing Cancer Care Pathways for the New Environment
As community practices and the insurance industry seek cost-effective ways to adapt to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the evolving concept of cancer care pathways is emerging as a strategy that may help control oncology costs and add value to care. At ASCO’s recent Quality Care...
Measuring and Improving Quality in Oncology Practices
The seed for ASCO’s Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI®) was planted a decade ago by Joseph Simone, MD, when he contemplated the feasibility of studying a volunteer group of oncologists to measure the quality of care they provide and share those results with their colleagues. Dr. Simone’s...
Excellent Preliminary Results for Ibrutinib in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia
Although still in preliminary testing with no phase III data, ibrutinib is poised to become an important new agent for patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). Two phase II trials reported at the 54th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH) found that ibrutinib achieved...
Does Health-care Quality Translate to Value?
On March 23rd, 2010, President Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, enacting sweeping change in our health-care system. An underlying theme of the legislation is the realignment of our payment system so that it places value over volume of services. At ASCO’s first...
Are We Winning the War on Cancer?
On December 23, 1971, President Richard Nixon signed the U.S. National Cancer Act. This date is widely considered to mark the beginning of the so-called “War on Cancer,” although that phrase was introduced only later on. Over recent decades, journalists have from time to time questioned whether we...
SIDEBAR: Expect Questions from Patients
Results from the Adjuvant Tamoxifen: Longer Against Shorter (ATLAS) study “will have a follow-on effect of being able to guide physicians about the advantages of longer than 5 years of therapy for the premenopausal woman,” said V. Craig Jordan, OBE, PhD, DSc, Scientific Director at the Lombardi...
'Practice-changing' ATLAS Study Supports 10 vs 5 Years of Tamoxifen Therapy in Women with Breast Cancer
"Practice-changing" is the term several physicians and researchers used when asked by the media to describe the results of a study showing that extending tamoxifen therapy from 5 to 10 years for women with estrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer further reduced recurrence and mortality....
Social Media Is Helping My Brother Fight Kidney Cancer
My brother, Rick Thomas, is a great guy. I’m not just saying that because he’s my brother. He’s funny, warm, and kind to everyone he meets. He became a commercial airline pilot for American Airlines after flying C-5s in the Air Force for 12 years and has always been a responsible person and a...
PET-negative Scan after Short-course Chemotherapy Identifies Early Hodgkin Lymphoma Patients Who Can Forgo Radiation
Positron-emission tomography (PET)-directed therapy is promising for early-stage Hodgkin lymphoma, according to results of the UK NCRI RAPID trial presented at the 54th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH).1 The use of PET scan enabled the identification of a population of...
Expert Point of View: Sandra M. Swain, MD, FACP, and Lisa Carey, MD
Sandra M. Swain, MD, FACP, Medical Director, Washington Cancer Institute, MedStar Washington Hospital Center, Washington, DC, who moderated the session, said these interesting observations must now be validated in preclinical models of triple-negative tumors, and then tested in patients. “Residual...
SIDEBAR: Shout-out to Policymakers on Diabetes Education
“If we could just give a shout-out to policymakers to understand that in the long term,” when patients who have diabetes and cancer receive adequate diabetes education, “we are cutting our length of stay, we are decreasing hospital costs, we are decreasing readmission rates,” June McKoy, MD, MPH,...
SIDEBAR: Expect Questions from Patients with Diabetes and Cancer
Patients with diabetes and cancer need to know that some chemotherapy drugs and adjuvant agents may require modifications in how they manage their diabetes. For example, patients who are receiving steroids might have to further restrict their diet to keep blood sugar levels under control. “You...
Keeping Diabetes under Control Is Critical to Good Outcomes for Patients Who Also Have Cancer
In the News focuses on media reports that your patients may have questions about at their next visit. This continuing column will provide summaries of articles in the popular press that may prompt such questions, as well as comments from colleagues in the field. Cancer and diabetes can be comorbid...
Betting Against the Odds
I knew the two tumors in my left breast were cancerous even before I got the pathology results back on my biopsy. I could clearly see the tumors on the digital mammogram my doctor ordered, and when the radiologist pointed out that they had spikes radiating from the edges and that he was scheduling...
Important Messages about Palliative Care and Hospice at the Heart of New End-of-life Memoir
The illness memoir’s appeal proves enduring in a very crowded genre, perhaps because illness is a tie that binds us all. As Susan Sontag wrote in her classic work, Illness as a Metaphor, “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in...
As Computers Learn to 'Talk' to Each Other, Patient Care Will Improve
Last fall, Edward P. Ambinder, MD, Clinical Professor of Medicine, Hematology, and Medical Oncology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, and a member of ASCO’s Health Information Technology Work Group, spoke about “The Information Age: Cyberspace and Cancer,” at the...
International Members Cite Networking, Enhanced Patient Care Among Benefits of ASCO Membership
Thanks to the membership category ASCO designed for physicians in developing countries, Brazilian oncologist Milena Mak, MD, can greatly enhance the care she delivers in the very busy 580-bed Instituto do Cancer do Estado de Sao Paulo. And radiation oncologist Pooja Nandwani Patel, MD, can use the...
Expert Point of View: David J. Kuter, MD, PhD
David J. Kuter, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Director of the Center for Hematology at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, commented on the findings for The ASCO Post. “TOPPS is a good attempt to address whether transfusions are helpful as prophylaxis in patients...
The Challenges and Rewards of Neuro-oncology
Despite the extremely difficult clinical challenges posed by brain tumors, mortality rates in this disease have decreased somewhat over the past several decades due, in part, to advances in surgical techniques and therapies. The ASCO Post recently discussed contemporary issues in neuro-oncology...
On Radiation and Cancer Risk
We owe our life to radiation. The universe was created in a thermonuclear explosion, and continued existence of life on Earth depends on plants using chlorophyll to capture light energy emitted by the sun (and exploding supernovas) and converting it into chemical energy, with the subsequent...
Study Finds Young Cancer Survivors Often Skip Checkups
Athough the majority of the more than 69,000 adolescents and young adults (AYAs) diagnosed with cancer each year will survive their disease, many of them will experience interruptions in their education and a derailment in their career tract, curtailing their lifetime earning potential and reducing ...
Patients with Cancer Need to Know That It Is Never Too Late to Quit Smoking
In the News focuses on media reports that your patients may have questions about at their next visit. This continuing column will provide summaries of articles in the popular press that may prompt such questions, as well as comments from colleagues in the field. Patients with head and neck or lung...
