In a study reported in JAMA Oncology, Clarke et al found that triage with p16/Ki-67 dual-stain testing (DS) was associated with better risk stratification for cervical precancer than Papanicolaou cytology testing over 5 years among human papilloma virus (HPV)–positive women. Study Details...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Guinter et al found that better prediagnosis and postdiagnosis dietary patterns were associated with improved overall and colorectal cancer–specific survival among patients diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Study Details The...
The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) recently issued a statement on lung cancer screening with low-dose computed tomography (CT) based on the results of the Dutch-Belgian NELSON lung cancer screening trial presented at the IASLC 19th World Conference on Lung Cancer...
In a study published by Mark A. Preston, MD, MPH, and colleagues in European Urology, researchers demonstrated that a baseline prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level obtained from black men between 40 and 60 years old may predict the future development of prostate cancer for years after testing....
The extreme fatigue I experienced during the winter of my fourth year in medical school, in 2003, was easily attributable to the rigors of my medical training and the lack of sleep that comes from trying to keep up with an intensely busy schedule. I was looking forward to resting and recuperating...
A health-care system is evaluated by various metrics: one is how it cares for its most vulnerable patients. The United States spends far more on health care than any nation in the world, yet access to high-quality oncology services remains elusive to certain minority populations—none more so than...
Female survivors of childhood cancer, especially those treated with chest irradiation, have a substantially higher risk of developing breast cancer later in life. As a result, current clinical screening of this high-risk population relies primarily on the radiation dose and volume to the...
Persephone is a 4,088-patient trial that Helena Margaret Earl, MBBS, PhD, reported at the 2018 ASCO Annual Meeting as establishing that 6 months of trastuzumab (Herceptin) is not inferior to 12 months in 4-year survival without invasive or local regional recurrence or distant metastases. Dr. Earl...
The Persephone presentation by Helena Margaret Earl, MBBS, PhD, got a lot of publicity after a pre–ASCO Annual Meeting press release, suggesting that 6 months of adjuvant trastuzumab (Herceptin) is enough. The advice of experts has been that the evidence is inconclusive, but I have not heard a...
Radiation therapy to the limited disease in patients with early-stage follicular lymphoma “achieves local control in over 90% of lesions, and almost 50% of patients remain free of any lymphoma event (cured) for decades,” Joanna C. Yang, MD, MPH, and Joachim Yahalom, MD, wrote in a recent editorial...
A prognostic model developed using a machine learning approach may be able to identify African American patients with breast cancer who have an increased risk of death, according to results of a study presented by Bhattarai et al at the 11th AACR Conference on The Science of Cancer Health...
A pilot study by Ma et al examining the intervention effect on the outcome of a provider-based, culturally tailored, multilevel intervention to promote human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination among Asian American adolescents has found that the strategy significantly increased the uptake of at least...
The combination of nivolumab (Opdivo) and low-dose ipilimumab (Yervoy) could become a new first-line treatment in patients with microsatellite instability–high (MSI-H), mismatch repair–deficient (dMMR) metastatic colorectal cancer, following results from the CheckMate-142 trial reported ...
Three prominent medical societies have issued a new clinical guideline for physicians treating men with early-stage prostate cancer using external-beam radiation therapy (EBRT). Adoption of the guideline could make treatment shorter and more convenient for many patients with prostate cancer....
In a study reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Buffart et al found that patients with cancer benefited more or less from exercise interventions depending on their baseline condition and timing of the intervention. The study was an individual patient data meta-analysis...
The first report of a large international clinical trial shows that, for men who show signs of prostate cancer after surgical removal of their prostates, extending radiation therapy to the pelvic lymph nodes combined with adding short-term androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) to standard treatment...
The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) recently issued a statement on lung cancer screening with low-dose computed tomography (CT) based on the results of the Dutch-Belgian NELSON lung cancer screening trial presented at the IASLC 19th World Conference on Lung Cancer...
A subset of patients with low-risk breast cancer is highly unlikely to see cancer return following breast conservation surgery, but can lower that risk even further with radiation therapy, finds a new long-term clinical trial report. These 12-year follow-up data from the only prospective,...
In a 10-year study of women who received radiation therapy to treat early-stage breast cancer, those receiving fewer, larger individual radiation doses experienced similarly low rates of late-onset side effects as those undergoing conventional radiation therapy. Findings from the...
A new analysis of genetic data from a large prospective registry and clinical data from several randomized trials indicates that African American patients may have comparatively higher cure rates when treated with radiation therapy than Caucasian patients. The study, which is the first report...
In an analysis of data from two Nurses’ Health Study cohorts reported in JAMA Oncology by Barnard et al, use of low-dose but not standard-dose aspirin was associated with reduced risk of epithelial ovarian cancer, whereas use of nonaspirin nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs)...
Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) improved survival in patients with head and neck cancer that has recurred or metastasized in the KEYNOTE-048 trial, according to late-breaking results from the study reported by Burtness et al at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2018 Congress (Abstract...
Radiation therapy for early-stage follicular lymphoma “is underused,” Joanna C. Yang, MD, MPH, and Joachim Yahalom, MD, declared in a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.1 This underuse of radiation therapy can result in overtreatment with systemic therapies or overconfidence in...
The ASCO Post’s Integrative Oncology series is intended to facilitate the availability of evidence-based information on integrative and complementary therapies sometimes used by patients with cancer. Although physical activity is associated with many positive outcomes in the general population,...
Recently, the term “personalized medicine” in oncology care has been overtaken by the more contemporary concept of “precision medicine.” According to the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, the newer terminology shifts the focus to improving...
On April 10, 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved everolimus tablets for oral suspension (Afinitor Disperz) for the adjunctive treatment of adult and pediatric patients aged ≥ 2 years with tuberous sclerosis complex–associated partial-onset seizures.1,2 Tuberous sclerosis complex is ...
A pair of studies showcased the potentially devastating long-term health and financial consequences cancer has on adult survivors of childhood cancer compared with other adults, as well as survival disparities based on health insurance status.1,2 Despite increasing survival rates among the more...
Radiotherapy to the prostate improved overall survival in men newly diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer who have a low metastatic disease burden, but not in those with higher burden of disease, according to results from a preplanned analysis of a large comparison study reported by Parker et...
ASCO issued a set of recommendations for overcoming financial barriers to patient participation in cancer clinical trials. The policy statement stresses the importance of increasing participation in clinical research, especially for patients from particular ethnic, racial, geographic, age,...
As the nation battles an escalating opioid-overdose crisis, which claims more than 100 lives per day, a new study presented at the 2018 ASCO Quality Care Symposium was designed to answer a heretofore unanswered question: How common are opioid-related deaths in patients with cancer?1 Unintended...
São Paulo oncologist and immunologist, Nise Yamaguchi, MD, PhD, has been recognized by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) with a Distinguished Award at the IASLC 19th World Conference on Lung Cancer (WCLC) in Toronto. Dr. Yamaguchi was given the Joseph W. Cullen...
“Patients with follicular lymphoma who relapse early after treatment are a minority of patients, fortunately, but they are clearly patients with a different disease,” according to Jonathon B. Cohen, MD, of Emory University School of Medicine. At Emory’s 2018 Debates and Didactics in Hematology and...
Results of the very large, randomized, population-based NELSON trial confirm the value of low-dose computed tomography (CT) screening in people at high risk for developing lung cancer. The protective value of screening was more pronounced in women than in men. These study findings were presented at ...
The combination of atezolizumab (Tecentriq), a programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) inhibitor, plus carboplatin or cisplatin and pemetrexed (Alimta) as first-line therapy followed by pemetrexed plus atezolizumab maintenance therapy improved progression-free survival in patients with stage IV...
Nearly 1 in 6 premenopausal women being treated for early-stage breast cancer do not adhere adequately to tamoxifen therapy after 1 year of treatment, potentially putting themselves at increased risk of recurrence and reduced survival, reported a French prospective study at the European Society for ...
Women with HER2-positive early breast cancer with small tumors have similar disease-free survival and lower risk of cardiac toxicity with a 9-week course of adjuvant trastuzumab (Herceptin) compared to those treated for 1 year, according to a subgroup analysis of the Short-HER trial reported by...
According to a new American Cancer Society report published by Gapstur et al in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, the highest priority in a national cancer control plan is the expansion of tobacco control—the intervention with the largest potential health benefits. This report is the...
In an analysis of International Global Germ Cell Cancer Group Registry data reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Cathomas et al, fluorodeoxyglucose positron-emission tomography (FDG-PET) was found to have a low positive predictive value for vital tumor in residual lesions after...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted a new drug application seeking accelerated approval for selinexor, a first-in-class, oral selective inhibitor of nuclear export (SINE) compound, as a new treatment for patients with pentarefractory multiple myeloma. The FDA...
The cancer burden in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory with a 99% Hispanic population, is substantially different from that of Hispanics in the continental United States, according to Cancer Statistics for Hispanics/Latinos, 2018. The report, published every 3 years, found that men in Puerto Rico...
A study from the Thoracic Oncology Research Group (TORG), Division of Pulmonary Critical Care, Medical University of South Carolina, aimed to examine the adherence to annual low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) screening after baseline LDCT within the Veteran Health Administration Lung Cancer...
FREE ME FROM LUNG CANCER (FMFLC) and the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) have announced the first-ever winner of the FMFLC-IASLC Foundation Joint Fellowship Award for the Early Detection of Lung Cancer. The FMFLC-IASLC Joint Fellowship Award supports novel,...
In a study published by Preston et al in European Urology, researchers demonstrated that a baseline prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level obtained from black men between 40 and 60 years old may predict the future development of prostate cancer for years after testing. The study builds on ...
Advances in the treatment of multiple myeloma have led to longer progression-free survival, but the majority of patients will still relapse despite newer treatments. A number of new drugs and combinations are under study in the hope of improving outcomes. “Multiple myeloma is a complex disease...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently permitted marketing of the ClonoSEQ assay, a next-generation sequencing–based test for minimal residual disease in patients with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) or multiple myeloma. “At the FDA, we’re continuing to...
In an analysis of Veterans Affairs data reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Bauml et al found that weekly lower-dose cisplatin vs higher-dose cisplatin given every 3 weeks as part of concurrent definitive chemoradiotherapy may not adversely affect survival, while reducing...
Lalan S. Wilfong, MD, of Texas Oncology, discusses reducing the use of a white blood cell growth factor treatment in advanced and incurable solid tumors for patients treated at a community oncology practice.
The C-C chemokine receptor 4 (CCR4) is predominantly expressed in type 2 helper T (Th2) cells and regulatory T (Treg) cells.1 Under physiologic conditions and in response to its ligands, CCL17 (TARC) and CCL22 (MDC), CCR4 promotes T-cell migration to the skin.2 Of note, CCR4 is highly expressed in...
Although approximately 20% to 30% of patients with cancer will develop venous thromboembolism (VTE), clinicians continue to debate strategies for pharmacologic treatment and prevention.1 At the 2018 Debates and Didactics in Hematology and Oncology Conference, held on Sea Island, Georgia, Christine...
Because neuroendocrine tumors are not one disease but a continuum of diseases, ranging from well-differentiated tumors to poorly differentiated and small cell tumors, treatment approaches can vary greatly. At the 2018 Debates and Didactics in Hematology and Oncology conference, held on Sea Island,...