Peter Marks, MD, PhD, Director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), was born in Brooklyn, New York, near Sheepshead Bay—an area named for the Sheepshead, a fish that can no longer be found in the waters that frame the neighborhood....
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Roisin M. Connolly, MD, and colleagues, updated results of the phase II TBCRC026 trial indicate an association of early F-18 fluorodeoxyglucose positron-emission tomography/computed tomography (F-18 FDG PET/CT) maximum standardized uptake value...
The American Urological Association (AUA) announced amendments to its clinical guideline on Renal Masses and Localized Renal Cancer, originally published in 2013 and updated in 2017, based on an additional literature search conducted through October 2020. One in four renal masses are benign;...
“Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.” —Hippocrates To complement The ASCO Post’s continued comprehensive coverage of the 2020 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition, here are several abstracts selected from the...
Early-onset colorectal cancer incidence rates in the United States have nearly doubled between 1992 and 2013—up from 8.6 to 13.1 per 100,000 individuals—with most of that increase due to early-onset cancers of the rectum. A new study published by Archambault et al in JNCI Cancer Spectrum focused on ...
An American Cancer Society (ACS) review of cancer prevention and early detection measures for 2018 and 2019 in the United States shows mixed progress. Smoking prevalence during this time was at an historic low, partly because most people who ever smoked have quit. However, obesity rates remained...
The combination of dabrafenib plus trametinib led to encouraging and durable responses in patients with low- and high-grade gliomas harboring BRAF V600E mutations, according to the results of the phase II basket study known as ROAR. Results were presented during the virtual edition of the American...
Treatment with abemaciclib, an orally available inhibitor of CDK4/6, has been associated with venous thromboembolic events (VTE), elevated aminotransferases (EAT), and interstitial lung disease (ILD). Although more episodes of VTE, EAT, and ILD were reported in patients receiving abemaciclib plus...
Pent up demand for cancer screenings, diagnostic workups, and treatments delayed or curtailed since the start of the pandemic is expected to result in a surge of patients—some with more advanced disease as a result of delays—seeking appointments with oncologists. “We are starting to see the...
City of Hope has announced the renaming of its diabetes research center as the Arthur Riggs Diabetes & Metabolism Research Institute, in honor of its long-time director and research pioneer. Arthur Riggs, PhD, is known for scientific achievements that include developing the technology leading...
Cardio-oncology represents the intersection of cancer and cardiovascular disease. Cancer therapies can result in cardiovascular complications, and some patients become less attentive to their chronic disease management after a diagnosis of cancer. As cancer patients are living longer, for some,...
In a study reported in JACC: CardioOncology, Emily S. Lau, MD, of the Cardiology Division, Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, and colleagues found that the presence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors was significantly associated with an increased risk of future...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Turan et al found the presence of germline BRCA pathogenic variants was associated with diminished ovarian reserve in young women, particularly in those diagnosed with breast cancer and those with BRCA1 variants. Study Details The individual...
In a small, single-institution phase I trial reported in JAMA Oncology, Kamran et al found that the use of a contralateral esophagus-sparing radiotherapy technique in patients receiving high-dose chemoradiation for locally advanced lung cancer was associated with no cases of grade ≥ 3 esophagitis,...
Disease regression was observed in 82% of women with endometrial hyperplasia with atypia and 43% of women with endometrial cancer after treatment for 6 months with a hormonal intrauterine device in a phase II study reported during the virtual edition of the Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO)...
Everything about my breast cancer diagnosis, from my presentation to diagnosis, was strange. In the spring of 2006, I was performing my monthly breast self-exam when I felt a hard lump in the upper left quadrant of my left breast. Having lost a good friend to breast cancer 4 years earlier, I was...
Breast cancer survivors who are overweight have a statistically significant increased risk of developing second primary cancers, according to results from a study conducted by Feigelson et al and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. “These findings have important public health ...
Xin Gao, MD, a medical oncologist at Mass General Hospital and Instructor at Harvard Medical School, said these were important findings. “Analyses of patient-reported outcomes pertaining to health-related quality-of-life measures from CheckMate 9ER showed significantly improved quality-of-life...
At 33, I’m not living the life I had imagined for myself. If cancer hadn’t interrupted my plans, I would be serving in the United States Army Special Forces by now, a profession that was inspired by my father’s career as a military officer and helicopter pilot and one that I had dreamed about since ...
Research published by Orgel et al in the journal Blood Advances showed that restricting calories, reducing fat and sugar intake, and increasing physical activity may boost the effectiveness of chemotherapy for older children and adolescents with leukemia. This intervention, which improved...
Consumption of ultra-processed food and drink could increase the risk of developing colorectal cancer. This was the conclusion of a large study published by Romaguera et al in Clinical Nutrition based on questionnaires about food behaviors completed by around 8,000 people in Spain. The study, the...
Egypt is a country of 1,010,408 km2 located on the northeast corner of Africa with a population exceeding 100 million. In 2018, there were about 134,632 new cancer cases and 89,042 cancer-related deaths in Egypt. Liver and breast cancers are the most common tumors in terms of incidence and...
“Now we know enfortumab vedotin-ejfv is here to stay in the armamentarium of treatment for advanced urothelial cancer,” said Arlene O. Siefker-Radtke, MD, of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, during her discussion of both EV-301 and EV-201. “As we saw, overall survival was quite...
Although cancers of the gallbladder or bile ducts are rare, their rates of occurrence are increasing. A recent study published by Ouyang et al in the journal Cancer provided details on the burden of gallbladder and biliary tract cancer across 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2017....
In a study reported in JACC: CardioOncology, Emily S. Lau, MD, and colleagues found that the presence of cardiovascular disease risk factors was significantly associated with an increased risk of future cancer, although no increased risk was observed among individuals who had a history of...
In a study reported in a research letter in JAMA Oncology, Lalani et al found that higher body mass index (BMI) was associated with better overall survival among patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma receiving anti–PD-1/PD-L1–based immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment. No association of...
In a Dutch study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, van Schaik et al found that significant weight gain and being overweight and/or obese are common in childhood brain tumor survivors and may be associated with hypothalamic-pituitary dysfunction. Study Details The study involved data...
New research published by van Seventer et al in JNCCN—Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network has found that muscle mass was correlated with survival, while muscle radiodensity was associated with symptom burden, health-care use, and survival in patients with advanced cancer undergoing ...
In 2020, ASCO established the Steering Group on Cancer Care Delivery and Research in a Post-Pandemic Environment to evaluate the changes made in oncology care delivery, clinical research, and regulatory oversight in response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as to make recommendations on how to...
I had my first experience with cancer when I was just 3 or 4 years old and complained to my mother that my “tummy hurt.” I was diagnosed with Wilms tumor, the same cancer my 18-month-old brother died of before I was born. I remember being in the hospital for weeks at a time and being known by...
Research published by Martel et al in JNCCN—Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network examined body mass index (BMI) data for patients with HER2-positive early breast cancer—and found a 5% weight loss in patients over 2 years was associated with worse outcomes. Weight gain over the same...
People living in regions with high levels of outdoor artificial light at night may face a higher risk of developing thyroid cancer, according to a study published by Zhang et al in the journal Cancer. Link Between Nighttime Light and Cancer Risk Over the past century, nightscapes—especially in...
Neil M. Iyengar, MD, Assistant Attending Physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, has researched the links between breast cancer and lifestyle. He provided comments on these two abstracts from the 2020 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) for The ASCO Post. “These two...
Due to concerns that patients with cancer may be at higher risk for contracting the coronavirus—and may have more severe complications if infected—during the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals and clinical practices have changed protocols to routine cancer care to reduce patients’ exposure to the virus....
In a phase Ib/II study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, David A. Sallman, MD, and colleagues found that the combination of azacitidine and the first-in-class small-molecule agent eprenetapopt produced high response rates in patients with TP53-mutant myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS)....
Even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, tobacco use remains a serious public health threat. In addition to tobacco-related death and disease, smoking also increases the risk of the most severe impacts of COVID-19. The American Lung Association has released its 19th annual “State of Tobacco Control”...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Weiser et al have developed a "third-generation" clinical calculator at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), which incorporates molecular and clinicopathologic characteristics and provides an accurate prediction of disease recurrence...
Sometimes there just is no escaping cancer. I thought I had done everything right. I was diligent about adhering to my annual physical exams, including mammograms, and routinely performed breast self-exams to spot any early changes in my breasts. Still, in the summer of 2015, I was diagnosed with...
Five Innovation Discovery Grants (IDG) have been awarded to faculty from Mass General Brigham for scientific advancements, as the highly competitive IDG program exceeds $3.5 million in grants since inception. Each of the five potential patient health and health-care delivery breakthroughs for 2020...
If your patient were an older woman opting for hormonal therapy after surgically excised ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), which hormonal agent would you recommend for the prevention of disease recurrence: tamoxifen or anastrozole? According to long-term follow-up of the large, randomized IBIS...
According a new study published by Eckstein et al in the American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), new suspicious findings occurred in 5.5% of breast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) examinations performed to monitor patients’ response to neoadjuvant therapy; none of these newly detected lesions...
In a comprehensive molecular characterization of the most common type of head and neck cancer, researchers from the United States and Poland have clarified the contribution of key cancer-associated genes, proteins, and signaling pathways in these cancers, while proposing possible new treatment...
Six months before my diagnosis of metastatic colorectal cancer, in 2016, at age 38, I told my mom, “I feel like I’m dying.” Even though more than 10 specialists I had seen over the previous 8 years for unexplained bouts of abdominal pain and bloating, fatigue, and constipation kept assuring me that ...
The text and photographs here are excerpted from a four-volume series of books titled Oncology: Tumors & Treatment, A Photographic History, The Radium Era 1916–1945 by Stanley B. Burns, MD, FACS, and Elizabeth A. Burns. The photographs appear courtesy of Stanley B. Burns, MD, and The Burns...
Victoria was a 79-year-old woman living alone in a London suburb. Having no children of her own, she visited us regularly here in the United States. She was one of three sisters and my sister-in-law. I knew her for more than 50 years, and she always reminded me of Audrey Hepburn, both in looks and ...
When I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2018, my first thought was, I hope my three young children do not lose two parents to cancer. My husband, Ricky, had survived two bouts of cancer, early-stage colorectal cancer and, most recently, stage I kidney cancer. Like Ricky’s two...
That Moses Judah Folkman would buck tradition, breaking his family’s long line of rabbinical succession and pursuing a career in science and medicine instead, was evident from the time he was a young child. Born in Cleveland on February 24, 1933, the first child of Rabbi Jerome and Bessie Folkman, ...
Endometrial cancer is the fourth most common cancer diagnosed in the United States, and the seventh most common cause of cancer death among women.1 This year, nearly 66,000 women will be diagnosed with the cancer, and about 12,600 will die of the disease.2 And although endometrial cancer is one of...
Among patients with glioblastoma receiving an immune checkpoint inhibitor, those who received the corticosteroid dexamethasone at baseline for cerebral edema had significantly worse overall survival, according to results of a study published by Iorgulescu et al in Clinical Cancer Research....
In a retrospective case series reported in JAMA Oncology, Burns et al described clinical characteristics, treatment, experiences, and outcomes among transgender patients with cancer. As stated by the investigators, “Approximately 0.5% to 0.6% of the U.S. population identify as transgender, defined...