Lymphoma expert Jeremy S. Abramson, MD, was born in Westchester County, New York, but soon after, his family relocated to Bergen County, New Jersey, where he spent his formative years. “I attended Tenafly High School and had dual passions: one was the natural sciences and the other on the...
The American Cancer Society has released its Cancer Statistics 2023 report, which showed that overall cancer mortality has dropped by 33% since 1991, averting an estimated 3.8 million cancer deaths. Data in the report, which was published by Siegel et al in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, also ...
Research shows that pain is a common byproduct of cancer and its treatment, with approximately 55% of patients undergoing active treatment experiencing pain, and more than 66% of patients with advanced disease experiencing pain. According to the ASCO guideline on the use of opioids for adults with...
Just days before the publication of the 2022 Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer on October 27, 2022,1 which showed a continued downward trend in cancer deaths, Karen Knudsen, MBA, PhD, Chief Executive Officer of the American Cancer Society (ACS), joined the First Lady Dr. Jill...
Lali Medina-Kauwe, PhD, former Co-Leader of the Cancer Biology Program in Cedars-Sinai Cancer, assumed a new role as Associate Director for Basic Research. The Cancer Biology Program will now be led by Dolores Di Vizio, MD, PhD, Professor of Biomedical Sciences, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in ...
My father was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1994, when he was just 55 years old. He died 6 years later. The cancer was so aggressive, it took only a few weeks from the time he was diagnosed for the cancer to grow to the size of a softball, and even a radical prostatectomy couldn’t save his...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Damgacioglu et al found that squamous cell carcinoma of the anus incidence and mortality rates increased in men and women aged ≥ 50 years at diagnosis between 2001 to 2005 and 2014 to 2018, with increases concentrated in Midwestern and...
A new ASCO guideline on the management of advanced colorectal cancer summarizes the latest treatments supported by quality data that could expand oncologists’ armamentarium and potentially improve survival outcomes.1 “[Colorectal cancer] remains the second-leading class of cancer deaths among men ...
Chemotherapy-induced hair loss affects 65% of patients with cancer,1 and the psychosocial impact on these patients can be profound; it may include anxiety, depression, a negative body image, lowered self-esteem, and a reduced sense of well-being.2 In some instances, the fear of hair loss from...
Iris C. Gibbs, MD, FACR, FASTRO, of Stanford Medicine in California and Chair of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) Council on Health Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, was an invited discussant for this study on physician assessment of sexual dysfunction in women vs men receiving...
Many radiation oncologists tend to discuss the sexual side effects of radiation therapy, specifically brachytherapy, with men more often than with women, according to a two-part study reported at the 2022 American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) Annual Meeting.1 At a high-volume cancer...
According to the results of the phase III randomized Prostate Cancer Study 5 (PCS5), a noninferior trial, 5 weeks of radiation therapy may be equivalent to 8 weeks for men with high-risk prostate cancer on androgen-deprivation therapy. These findings were presented at the 2022 American Society for...
Taken together with the primary clinical results, a secondary analysis of the phase III SWOG S1404 randomized clinical trial demonstrated that pembrolizumab provides superior clinical and patient-reported quality-of-life outcomes compared to standard of care with adjuvant ipilimumab or high-dose...
OVERALL CANCER death rates continued to decline among men, women, children, and adolescents/young adults in every major racial and ethnic group in the United States from 2015 to 2019, according to the latest Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer.1 From 2014 to 2018, the overall cancer ...
Colorectal cancer ranks third among cancer deaths in both men and women in the United States, with an estimated 150,000 new cases and 52,000 deaths anticipated in 2022.1 Colorectal cancer rates have declined by approximately 2% per year from 2014 to 2018 in people older than age 50, which is...
In a phase II trial (SALV-ENZA) reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Phuoc T. Tran, MD, PhD, and colleagues found that the addition of enzalutamide to salvage radiotherapy improved freedom from prostate-specific antigen (PSA) progression in patients with biochemically recurrent prostate...
An updated ASCO guideline recommends lutetium-177–labeled PSMA-617 (LuPSMA), a targeted radioligand therapy, for patients with prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA)-positive metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer who have been treated with one prior line of androgen receptor pathway...
To achieve its goal of eliminating cervical cancer, the World Health Organization (WHO) is calling on all countries “to reach and maintain an incidence rate of below 4 per 100,000 women.” Doing so would depend on the following: A total of 90% of girls being fully vaccinated against human...
In a pooled analysis (SANDSTORM) reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Ma et al found that concurrent/adjuvant short-term androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) with prostate-only radiotherapy (PORT) was associated with better outcomes in multiple measures vs neoadjuvant/concurrent ADT with...
In a prespecified analysis from the Australian phase II TheraP trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Buteau et al found that higher gallium-68–labeled PSMA-11 positron-emission tomography (PSMA-PET) mean standardized uptake values (SUVmean) were associated with a greater likelihood of...
In a pragmatic trial reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Bretthauer et al, on behalf of the Nordic-European Initiative on Colorectal Cancer (NordICC) Study Group, found a reduced risk of colorectal cancer diagnosis but no significant reduction in disease-specific mortality among...
The addition of 24 months of androgen-deprivation therapy to postoperative radiotherapy after radical prostatectomy provided a metastasis-free survival benefit and improved the time to salvage therapy in patients with prostate cancer, according to the preliminary results from the RADICALS-HD trial...
Colorectal cancer ranks third among cancer deaths in both men and women in the United States, with an estimated 106,000 new cases and 52,000 deaths anticipated in 2022.1 Colorectal cancer rates have declined by approximately 2% per year from 2014 to 2018 in people over the age of 50 years, which is ...
At this year’s European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress, we experienced an eagerly awaited return to normality (or almost), and the quality of the science on display was anything but disappointing: from molecular medicine to treatment de-escalation, from early cancer detection and...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Kim et al, the phase II National Cancer Institute 9984 trial has shown prolonged radiographic progression-free survival with the addition of cediranib to olaparib in patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. Study Details In...
NRG Oncology investigators analyzed clinical and digital histopathology data from five phase III prostate cancer trials (NRG/RTOG 9202, 9408, 9413, 9910, and 0126) to develop and validate multimodal artificial intelligence models (MMAI) that could outperform the National Comprehensive Cancer...
Overall cancer death rates continued to decline among men, women, children, adolescents, and young adults in every major racial and ethnic group in the United States from 2015 to 2019, according to the latest Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer. From 2014 to 2018, overall cancer...
A new study has found that sexual side effects of cancer treatment are discussed far less frequently with female patients than with male patients, even when the treatment directly affects sex organs. Among patients receiving brachytherapy for prostate or cervical cancer at a high-volume cancer...
The Republic of Austria is a high-income, landlocked country in south-central Europe and has been a member of the European Union since 1995.1 Vienna, the capital city of nearly 2 million people, is regularly ranked among the most livable cities in the world.2 The total population of Austria is more ...
It is estimated that one in eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in his lifetime. The disease is so prevalent, and other than skin cancer, it is the most common cancer diagnosed in American men. According to the American Cancer Society, this year, about 268,490 new cases of prostate...
Endocrine therapy is the foundation of first-line therapy in most patients with hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer. Many of these patients respond to endocrine therapy but eventually become resistant to it through both intrinsic and acquired resistance mechanisms....
A randomized study has confirmed that patients with high-risk prostate cancer can be treated with 5 vs 8 weeks of radiation therapy. The phase III clinical trial is the first to confirm the safety and efficacy of a moderately shortened course of radiation exclusively for patients with high-risk...
Female patients with cancer were less satisfied with the quality of their cancer care than male patients with cancer, according to the results of a survey conducted by the Survivor Views program of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN). In addition, female patients were more...
In a case-control study reported in JAMA Oncology, Minkyo Song, MD, PhD, and colleagues found that seropositivity for gastric antiparietal cell antibodies (APCAs) was associated with an increased risk of gastric cancer among younger Finnish women who were seronegative for antibodies to Helicobacter ...
The addition of 24 months of androgen-deprivation therapy to postoperative radiotherapy after radical prostatectomy provided a metastasis-free survival benefit and improved the time to salvage therapy in patients with prostate cancer, according to the preliminary results from the RADICALS-HD trial...
Survivors of prostate cancer originally diagnosed with metastatic disease may experience significantly worse health-related quality of life than those diagnosed with early-stage disease and individuals without a cancer history across all domains, according to a new study by Zheng et al published in ...
Abstract discussant Jacek Jassem, MD, of the Medical University of Gdansk, Poland, underscored smoking as the most important cause of lung cancer, noting that between 85% and 90% of patients with lung cancer are current or former smokers. “Lung cancer screening, which has recently become standard...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Tree et al, an analysis from the phase III PACE-B trial has shown no difference in 2-year genitourinary or gastrointestinal toxicity with conventionally fractionated/moderately hypofractionated intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) vs highly hypofractionated...
An unhealthy gut triggers changes in normal breast tissue that may help breast cancer metastasize, according to new, early research from the University of Virginia (UVA) Cancer Center published by Feng et al in Cancer Immunology Research. The researchers found that when the gut microbiome is...
Black patients of African descent tend to be diagnosed more frequently with prostate cancer and have higher mortality rates than patients of other races and ethnicities. Despite this substantial disparity, few prospective studies focused on maximizing the recruitment of African American patients...
Guest Editor’s Note: Several studies have shown that regular physical activity helps to reduce the symptom burden and improve disease-related outcomes in patients with cancer. In this article, Jessica M. Scott, PhD, and Neil M. Iyengar, MD, summarize the current evidence surrounding exercise...
Certain genetic variants found in prostate tumors of men of African descent were associated with African ancestry, according to two studies presented at the 15th American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial and Ethnic Minorities...
In a large study led by researchers at the American Cancer Society (ACS), men and women who drank two or more servings of sugar-sweetened beverages per day had a 5% increased risk of death from an obesity-related cancer, including gastrointestinal, postmenopausal breast, endometrial, and kidney...
Abstract discussant, Jacek Jassem, MD, of the Medical University of Gdansk, in Poland, underscored smoking as the most important cause of lung cancer, noting that between 85% and 90% of patients with lung cancer are current or former smokers. “Lung cancer screening, which has recently become...
In a study reported in a research letter in JAMA Oncology, Cai et al found that the incidence of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma increased in the United States between 2000 and 2018. The study involved data from 18 Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program registries for 2000 to 2018. A...
In a prospective cohort study reported in JAMA Network Open, Metwally et al found no significant differences in positive examination, cancer detection, or false-positive rates among individuals with vs without self-reported lung-related comorbidities undergoing low-dose computed tomography lung...
Aggarwal et al presented data from PRESTO (AFT-19) at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2022 (Abstract LBA63), the first trial to evaluate whether intensifying treatment beyond androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) by adding apalutamide with or without abiraterone acetate plus...
Perhaps the best known of all cancer predisposition genes are inherited mutations in the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. They were originally associated with an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancers. Later studies revealed that they also increased the risk of prostate and pancreatic cancers and, in...
Two studies published simultaneously by Jaratlerdsiri et al in Nature and Gong et al in Genome Medicine have identified genetic signatures explaining ethnic differences in the severity of prostate cancer, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Through genetic sequencing of prostate cancer tumors from...
In a population-based age-period-cohort study reported in JAMA Oncology, Zhang et al estimated that current human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination rates will have a limited impact on overall oropharyngeal cancer incidence through 2045, due to a high risk of oropharyngeal cancer in unvaccinated...