With headlines such as “Cutting back on alcohol can prevent cancers”1 and “Even light drinking may raise your cancer risk,”2 media reports may be generating questions from patients about the ASCO statement summarizing evidence linking alcohol to an increased risk of cancer.3 “What I personally...
This December, Forbes magazine recognized 27 breast oncologists across the country as exemplary physicians in the field of oncology. Individuals on the list serve in the top spots of their respective hospitals, contribute a wealth of clinical research to advance the practice, and serve on community ...
A recently released ASCO statement summarizing extensive evidence linking alcohol use to an increased risk of several leading cancers, including breast, colon, and head and neck, called on oncologists “as front-line providers for cancer patients” to help patients reduce excessive alcohol use.1...
My diagnosis of neuroblastoma when I was 14 happened rather accidentally. I was a competitive dancer and very active in sports my first year in high school and had no symptoms of cancer or any illness. It wasn’t until my mother, who is a nurse, came into my room one morning to wake me for school...
GUEST EDITOR Dr. Abraham is the Director of the Breast Oncology Program at Taussig Cancer Institute, and Professor of Medicine, Lerner College of Medicine, Cleveland Clinic. For this installment in the Living a Full Life series of articles, Andrew D. Seidman, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer ...
The Connect2Health Task Force, an initiative of the Federal Communmications Commission (FCC), has announced that the FCC and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) have joined forces, signing a memorandum of understanding that will focus on how increasing broadband access and adoption in rural areas...
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of the “Art of Oncology” as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer, and they include narratives, topical essays,...
Combinations of targeted therapies (triple, quadruple, or even more) are part of the future of cancer treatment, which means that traditional clinical trials will have to be streamlined and updated to enable greater flexibility and to extract adequate safety and efficacy data. Problems inherent in...
In 1996, Jimmie C. Holland, MD, the Wayne E. Chapman Chair in Psychiatric Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) in New York, decided to launch the cancer center’s Lung Cancer Survivorship Program after she had a startling encounter with a patient. “The woman said to me, ‘Would...
Breast cancer specialist Katherine E. Reeder-Hayes, MD, MBA, was born on a farm in Morgan County, Alabama. “My family grew soybeans and cotton and raised cattle. None of my family members were in the medical field, but I always felt comfortable around people who were sick or had emergencies and...
Check out new ASCO Answers fact sheets on oral chemotherapy and head and neck cancer at Cancer.Net. These introductions include an overview, illustrations, terms to know, and questions to ask the health-care team. Find them and a library of titles at www.Cancer.Net/factsheets, and order copies for ...
Women in oncology aren’t ascending the leadership ladder at rates anywhere close to their male counterparts—and ASCO wants to fix that. The most recent report on “The State of Women in Academic Medicine” from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) said that although women make up...
Xiuning Le, MD, PhD Assistant Professor The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer CenterSpecialty: Thoracic/head & neck cancer, breast cancer Of all the adjectives used to describe cancer, one in particular can be surprising: smart. In fact, one of the reasons cancer can be so hard to treat...
Columbia University and NewYork-Presbyterian announced that Florence Irving and her late husband, Herbert Irving, have given $700 million to the two institutions to advance research and clinical programs for the treatment of cancer. The Irvings’ historic gift will have a profound impact on research ...
AS REPORTED in The Lancet Oncology by Matthijs Oudkerk, MD, of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and colleagues, a European Union (EU) expert group has issued a position statement on low-dose computed tomography (CT) screening for lung cancer, proposing a near-term phased implementation ...
A SUPERVISED and individualized exercise program can reduce fatigue and pain while improving cardiovascular health and quality of life in women being treated for advanced breast cancer, according to research presented by Eduardo Oliveira, PhD, Professor of Exercise Physiology and Exercise Cancer...
Despite advances in prevention, early detection, and treatments, lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. Although cigarette smoking is the main cause of lung cancer, about 10% of these patients are lifelong never smokers for whom the molecular...
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), from 1999 to 2015, more than 183,000 people have died in the United States from overdoses related to prescription opioids, including methadone, oxycodone, and hydrocodone.1 To stem the epidemic in prescription opioid–related use and ...
An additional 5 years of aromatase inhibitor therapy after 5 years of adjuvant endocrine therapy failed to improve disease-free survival compared with an additional 2 years of aromatase inhibitor therapy in postmenopausal women with hormone receptor–positive breast cancer, according to the results ...
FOR NEWLY DIAGNOSED multiple myeloma patients not eligible for transplant, the addition of the anti-CD38 monoclonal antibody daratumumab (Darzalex) to subcutaneous bortezomib (Velcade), melphalan, and prednisone (VMP) reduced the risk of disease progression or death by 50%, the phase III ALCYONE...
The Federal Communications Commission’s Connect2Health Task Force (C2HFCC) has announced that the FCC and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) have joined forces, signing a memorandum of understanding that will focus on how increasing broadband access and adoption in rural areas can improve...
The American Medical Association (AMA) is reminding physicians that the Medicare reimbursement system has changed, and, if they have not done so already, they have until December 31, 2017, to take a few simple steps to avoid a Medicare payment penalty in 2019. The changes are part of the...
In a study in the PETACC-8 trial population reported in JAMA Oncology, Taieb et al found that the risk of recurrence in patients with stage III colon cancer differed for the primary tumor location according to RAS- and BRAF-mutation status. Study Details A total of 2,559 patients were...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Patel et al, the anti–programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) antibody avelumab (Bavencio) produced durable responses in patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma after failure of platinum-based therapy in two expansion cohorts of...
In the first comprehensive analysis of clinical trial enrollment among older adults with blood cancers, researchers from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found significant gaps in participation among those aged 75 and older when considered against the incidence of these malignancies in...
Six months after receiving a single dose of tisagenlecleucel, a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy that targets CD-19, high response rates persist among adult patients with relapsed or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), according to findings reported by Schuster et al at...
One-third of patients with previously treated chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) had no detectable disease after 6 months of combination therapy with the targeted agents ibrutinib (Imbruvica) and venetoclax (Venclexta), with no increase in the occurrence of tumor-lysis syndrome, a serious treatment ...
Older women with hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer who were treated with cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) 4/6 inhibitors achieved progression-free survival at a rate similar to that of younger women, according to data presented by Singh et al at the 2017 San...
On November 30, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved CDx (F1CDx), a breakthrough-designated, next-generation sequencing–based in vitro diagnostic test that can detect genetic mutations in 324 genes and 2 genomic signatures in any solid tumor type. The Centers for Medicare &...
BOOKMARK Title: Hematopoietic Cell Transplants: Concepts, Controversies, and Future DirectionsEditors: Hillard M. Lazarus, MD; Robert Peter Gale, MD, PhD, DSc (hon), FACP; Armand Keating, MD, FRCP(C); Andrea Bacigalupo, MD; Reinhold Munker, MD; Kerry Atkinson, MBBS, MD, DTM&H, FRCP, FRACP; and...
BOOKMARK Title: Tripping Over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine’s Most Entrenched ParadigmsAuthor: Travis Christofferson, MSPublisher: Chelsea Green PublishingPublication Date: February 2017Price: $24.95, hardcover; 288 pages Bringing a book to market is...
BOOMARK Title: The Last LectureAuthor: Randy Pausch with Jeffrey ZaslowPublisher: HyperionDate: April 2008Price: $21.95, hardcover; 206 pages Faced with imminent death, how does one chose to live out the remainder of one’s life? Such is the question at the heart of The Last Lecture, a memoir...
The following essay by Stan Winokur, MD, is adapted from The Big Casino: America’s Best Cancer Doctors Share Their Most Powerful Stories, which was coedited by Dr. Winokur and -Vincent Coppola and published in May 2014. The book is available on Amazon.com and thebigcasino.org. I looked into her...
The first consensus recommendations on the recognition and clinical management of immune-related side effects from cancer immunotherapy were recently published in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer (JITC).1 The article, “Managing Toxicities Associated With Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors:...
University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center researcher Barbara Savoldo, MD, PhD, has been awarded a $600,000, 3-year grant from to support research of an immunotherapy being developed. The grant will help fund clinical research into an investigational chimeric antigen...
Nationally recognized lymphoma expert Sonali M. Smith, MD, was born and reared in Chicago to a mother who was a pediatrician and allergist, and a father who was an engineer. Her parents were first-generation immigrants from India who placed the value of education second to none. “I became used to...
The National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®) has created a new resource for patients living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) who develop acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)-related Kaposi sarcoma. This newly released NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology (NCCN...
While hope for a cure after a cancer diagnosis is a feeling both patients and oncologists rightly cling to during treatment, when too much emphasis is placed on this type of “focused” hope, it can make it more difficult for patients to face their mortality. Moreover, such a focus can deny patients ...
Do your patients have questions about palliative care/supportive care? Help them better understand their prognosis and goals of treatment, clarify their expectations, and maintain their quality of life with the ASCO Answers Palliative Care booklet. This booklet shows how palliative care is used...
Future oncology drug development and approvals will be faster and more efficient as well as take the patient experience more into account, said Richard Pazdur, MD, Director of the Oncology Center of Excellence at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Center was established as part of...
The Tisch Cancer Institute and the Precision Immunology Institute at Mount Sinai Health System are part of a $215 million public-private Cancer Moonshot research collaboration launched by the National Institutes of Health and 11 leading pharmaceutical companies. The 5-year initiative, called...
Cancer may be a disease of aging, but data suggest that older patients with cancer are undertreated, especially with respect to chemotherapy. One analysis showed that approximately 40% of patients in their 70s—and 60% of patients in their 80s—do not receive adjuvant therapy after surgery for colon...
Eduardo Bruera, MD, FAAHPM, Medical Director, Department of Supportive Care Center, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, underscored the study’s potential to influence clinical care decisions. “The emergency department is a ‘hard hat’ area of care where bad things happen and ...
Dyspnea, delirium, and poor performance—so-called “triple threat” conditions—are known to predict short survival in palliative care. According to data presented at the 2017 Palliative and Supportive Care in Oncology Symposium,1 however, the presence of at least two of these symptoms in patients...
Cancer care in Sub-Saharan Africa, as in other low-resource settings, can be a challenge: The right medications and equipment may be in short supply, maintaining equipment can be a problem, basic chemotherapy drugs may be unaffordable, and patients may not see doctors until the cancer is advanced....
“We are in the midst of a steep increase” in the incidence of breast cancer among women aged 65 years and older, Arti Hurria, MD, reported at the 19th Annual Lynn Sage Breast Cancer Symposium, Chicago.1 “Are we prepared as a health-care system and as providers to address this burgeoning need?” she...
As low-dose computed tomography (CT) screening for lung cancer has moved from clinical trials to clinical practice, management issues are growing more urgent for screening centers around the country: for instance, how to support referrals from and to other providers; how to ensure the quality of...
Acupuncture significantly reduced joint pain for postmenopausal women with early-stage breast cancer receiving treatment with an aromatase inhibitor compared with both sham acupuncture and no treatment, according to data from the randomized, phase III SWOG S1200 trial presented by Hershman et al at ...
Over the past 15 years, multiple myeloma has garnered among the highest number of regulatory approvals by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the management of all phases of the disease. This fast-expanding repertoire of treatment options has pushed the median survival of multiple...
This year has been an important transitional period for oncology providers to start collecting their performance data to meet the requirements of the Quality Payment Program outlined in the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA). The Quality Payment Program is a...