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Showing 5551 - 5600Checklists: Simple Tools That Enhance Quality
Evidence indicates that the use of surgical safety checklists results in marked improvements in patient outcomes. Unfortunately, their adoption in the field of medicine has largely been limited to equipment operations or parts of specific treatment algorithms. Yet they have tremendous potential to...
Top 5 Breakthroughs in the Treatment of Advanced Lung Cancer
A countdown of the top 5 breakthrough therapies in the treatment of advanced lung cancer was presented by D. Ross Camidge, MD, PhD, at the 2014 Chicago Multidisciplinary Symposium in Thoracic Oncology.1 Dr. Camidge is Director, Thoracic Oncology Clinical and Clinical Research Programs, and...
Hormonal Therapy for Early Breast Cancer: Do We Learn From Past Mistakes?
Guidelines can be incorrect if they are not based on incontrovertible evidence. Such was the case with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) 1995 guidelines recommending 5 years of tamoxifen adjuvant therapy for stage I to III hormone receptor–positive breast cancer. With more definitive evidence,...
New Agents and Novel Targets for Multiple Myeloma
New therapies for multiple myeloma have dramatically improved life expectancy, but despite these advances, 5-year overall survival still remains below 50%. Investigators are in hot pursuit of new therapies that will extend remissions and improve survival. Thus far, monoclonal antibodies,...
CancerLinQ: Building a Data Infrastructure to Improve Quality and Reduce Cost
In November 2013, ASCO initiated the development of CancerLinQ, a learning health system designed to transform cancer care and improve outcomes. At this year’s Quality Care Symposium in Boston, ASCO President Peter Paul Yu, MD, FACP, FASCO, Director of Cancer Research at the Palo Alto Medical...
Optimizing HER2 Therapy in Early and Advanced Breast Cancers
Trastuzumab (Herceptin) has been the cornerstone of therapy for HER2-positive tumors, which comprise about 20% of all breast tumors. Additional therapies targeted to other HER2 pathways or other targets to be used in combination with trastuzumab are being explored in both the adjuvant and...
Vincent T. DeVita, Jr, Helped Usher in the Era of Chemotherapy, Turning Lethal Cancers Into Curable Ones
Although Vincent T. DeVita, Jr, MD, harbored fantasies as a young child of becoming an ice deliveryman when he grew up, his love of chemistry and biology, as well as admonitions from his mother, Isabel, “to become a doctor,” propelled him toward a career in medicine. Now, more than 6 decades later, ...
Appetite-Enhancing Agent Helps Patients Treated for NSCLC Gain Weight and Lean Body Mass and Feel Better
People have an image of stage III or IV lung cancer patients getting chemotherapy or chemoradiation, and they look terrible; they are losing weight. The fact is, when they respond, they can gain weight,” according to Philip Bonomi, MD, MS. He is the lead author of a phase III study showing that the ...
The Wedding Picture
The following essay by Fadlo R. Khuri, MD, FACP, is excerpted from The Big Casino: America’s Best Cancer Doctors Share Their Most Powerful Stories (May 2014), coedited by Stan Winokur, MD, and Vincent Coppola. The book is available on Amazon.com and thebigcasino.org. Life and hope are why we go...
Internal Medicine: A Doctor’s Stories
Bookmark Title: Internal Medicine: A Doctor’s Stories Author: Terrence Holt, MD Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation Publication Date: September 2014 Price: $24.95; hardcover, 288 pages “This book is the story of a residency in internal medicine. I wrote it over a period of 10 years,...
Debate Over Legalizing Physician-Assisted Death for the Terminally Ill
On November 1, 2014, 29-year-old Brittany Maynard ended her life through physician-assisted death, reigniting the controversy surrounding Death With Dignity laws, which allow physicians to prescribe life-ending drugs to terminally ill patients. Diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme in January, Ms. ...
AACR CEO Discusses the Global Status of Cancer at Seminar in Turin, Italy
Margaret Foti, PhD, MD (hc), Chief Executive Officer of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), recently spoke at the Institute for Cancer Research and Treatment (IRCC) in Turin, Italy, on November 25. Her lecture was titled “Reflections on the Global Cancer Research Landscape.” The...
Antacids Linked to Better Survival in Patients With Head and Neck Cancer
Patients with head and neck cancer who used antacid medicines to control acid reflux had better overall survival, according to a study from the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center. Results of the study were published in Cancer Prevention Research.1 Reflux can be a common side effect...
Center to Advance Palliative Care
In the first quarter of 2015, the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) will become a member-based organization. Member organizations will have unlimited access to CAPC tools, training, and hands-on technical assistance. At that time, CAPC will launch the first of its online curricula, broken...
Palliative Care in 2014
Palliative care expert Diane E. Meier, MD, is the Director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC), a national organization devoted to enhancing the number and quality of palliative care programs across the nation. Under her leadership, the number of palliative care programs in the United...
Cancer Care Incomplete Without Palliative Care Integration
ASCO recognizes that an array of efforts are needed to fully integrate palliative care into the cancer care continuum, and the Society is committed to facilitating the integration of palliative cancer care into existing health-care systems worldwide in order to realize the vision of comprehensive...
Policy Issues in Molecularly Targeted Therapy: The Science, the Money, the Applications
In the past decade, much new knowledge about the molecular underpinnings of cancer has accumulated, and the array of molecular aberrations in each individual tumor can be assessed through genomic sequencing and other tests. The rationale for and feasibility of developing molecularly targeted...
Immune-Suppressing Protein in Noncancerous Cells of Cancer Patients Offers Clue to Drug Response
A multicenter phase I study using an investigational immune therapy drug has found that the presence of the immune-suppressing protein PD-L1 in noncancerous immune cells can predict how patients with different types of advanced cancer will respond to treatment. The study, led by a Yale Cancer...
Benefits of Exercise for Relieving Fatigue in Cancer Survivors
Fatigue is such a common—and ongoing—problem among cancer survivors, last spring, ASCO published a clinical practice guideline1 to address screening, assessment, and treatment approaches for the management of fatigue after patients have completed treatment. Among the strategies included in the...
Moving a Mountain: Crizotinib in ROS1-Rearranged NSCLC
It was thousands of years ago in China. An elderly man was unhappy with the mountain that embraced his seaside village. He would need to walk for hours before he could reach the nearest town. So, as the old fable goes, he set his mind to move the mountain. Every day, he dug up basketfuls of rocks...
ASCO Expert Statement on Cancer Survivorship Care Planning: Timing Is Everything
As the saying goes, “Timing is everything.” And so it is with the recently released ASCO Clinical Expert Statement on survivorship care planning.1 Although there has been extensive discussion and debate about the use of survivorship care plans since the publication of the 2005 Institute of Medicine ...
ASCO Clinical Expert Statement on Cancer Survivorship Care Planning
Efforts at implementing survivorship care plans have met with limited success in oncology practice, in part due to the time required to complete them, the lack of role clarity, and the lack of reimbursement for time to complete the documents. In response, ASCO convened a Survivorship Care Planning...
Lung Cancer: Next Frontier for Immunotherapy
Immune checkpoint inhibitors, particularly PD-1 (programmed cell death-1) and PD-L1 (programmed death-ligand 1) inhibitors, are being studied extensively in lung cancer. These agents, alone and in combination, appear to have the potential to change the management of non–small cell lung cancer...
Hedgehog Inhibitors Can Be Life-Altering in Patients With Advanced Basal Cell Carcinoma
What advanced basal cell carcinomas lack in frequency, they make up for in morbidity, and for these challenging patients, the hedgehog inhibitors have changed lives, according to experts at the 3rd Annual World Cutaneous Malignancies Congress, held recently in San Francisco. “The majority of basal...
Revisiting Successes in Advanced NSCLC to Test Value in Earlier-Stage Disease
Some pretty good evidence suggests that chemotherapy that works in advanced disease probably works even better in early-stage disease,” said Fadlo R. Khuri, MD, Chair, Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta, in summarizing results from trials of...
Lung Cancer Expert Offers Recommendations for Treating Toxicities Associated With Targeted Therapies
Clearly life as a thoracic oncologist has changed. Our paradigm for giving one-size-fits-all chemotherapy seems a bit dated, as we now are learning that there are multiple targets that we can treat effectively with the right drugs,” Jyoti D. Patel, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine at...
CMS Issues Preliminary Decision to Cover Annual Lung Cancer Screening
In a long-awaited decision, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued a preliminary proposal to cover annual lung cancer screening with low-dose computed tomography for appropriate beneficiaries following counseling and a shared–decision-making visit with a qualified...
Transplants for AML in First Remission: A Great Leap Forward, Sideways, or Backward?
“All great truths begin as blasphemies.” —George Bernard Shaw (Annajanksa, 1918) Until about 15 years ago, persons with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) were considered candidates to receive a blood cell or bone marrow allotransplant in first remission only if they had had an HLA-identical...
PD-1 Blockade Moves Into Hematology
The promise of the programmed death receptor-1 (PD-1) inhibitors seen in solid tumors, especially melanoma, may hold true for at least one hematologic malignancy, according to studies presented at the 56th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition. At a press briefing, data ...
Physicians Need to Maintain Flexibility to Deviate From Treatment Guidelines Without Financial Penalties
With the provocative headline, “How Medical Care Is Being Corrupted,” an op-ed piece in The New York Times argued that “financial forces largely hidden from the public are beginning to corrupt care and undermine the bond of trust between doctors and patients.”1 The article warned that insurers,...
Electro-Gynecology, Philadelphia, 1883
Through the Lens of Oncology History A Century of Progress The text and photographs on these pages represent the establishment of oncology as a viable medical specialty during the mid-1800s. The images and captions are excerpted from a four-volume series of books titled Oncology Tumors &...
Ovarian Cancer Has Taught Me to Be Fearless
In 2013, I was at the top of my professional game. I was a lead performer in the hit Broadway show Motown: The Musical, playing singing legend Diana Ross, which earned me a Tony Award nomination. Performing eight shows a week is exhausting, but I had no problem meeting the physical demands of the...
Life Is Like Riding a Bicycle
The following essay by Bruce D. Cheson, MD, is adapted from The Big Casino: America’s Best Cancer Doctors Share Their Most Powerful Stories, which was coedited by Stan Winokur, MD, and Vincent Coppola and published in May 2014. The book is available on Amazon.com and thebigcasino.org. The ride...
The Long and Winding Road to Modern Integrative Oncology
It has been a long road from the blind acceptance of unproven “alternative” remedies for the treatment of cancer to the development of rigorous guidelines for integrative care, which address symptom control. The recently released Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO) guidelines applicable to...
Personalized Integrative Cancer Care: Focus of the 11th International Conference of the Society for Integrative Oncology
There were several aspects of the 11th International Conference of the Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO), held October 26-28, 2014, in Houston, that distinguished it from past years. One major change was that this year’s conference was held in collaboration with The University of Texas MD...
Incorporating Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Into Palliative Care
Although cancer rehabilitation has been a part of oncology clinical practice for several decades, it has largely gone unrecognized as an integral part of palliative medicine and survivorship care. Now, the role of physical medicine and rehabilitation in oncology care may increase as patients with...
‘Mother of Bone Marrow Transplantation’ Dorothy ‘Dottie’ Thomas Dies at 92
Dorothy “Dottie” Thomas, wife and research partner to 1990 Nobel laureate E. Donnall Thomas, MD, died Friday, January 9, at her home near Seattle. She was 92. Dr. Donnall Thomas, Pioneer of the Bone Marrow Transplant and former Director of the Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer...
What It Means to Be Mortal
“I learned a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them,” writes Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, in his new book on the medicalization of aging and dying, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (Metropolitan Books, 2014). In the book, Dr. Gawande critiques the American...
Smarter Trial Design Saves Money and Produces Better Drugs
The process of identifying a promising molecule and moving it from the laboratory through the highly complex series of clinical trials necessary to garner U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval is a costly scientific gauntlet during which many new agents fail. New trial design,...
Panelists Lambast, Explore the High Cost of Cancer Drugs
At the 2014 American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting, a symposium on the high cost of cancer drugs proved provocative and a bit testy as panelists presented their various points of view. ‘Medical Darwinian System’ Already known for his outspoken views on the topic is Hagop M. Kantarjian, MD,...
Study Finds Whole-Genome Sequencing Is Successful in Identifying Patients’ Risk for Inherited Cancers
A study by researchers at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and The Ohio State University in Columbus of whole-genome sequencing on patients found to have BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations as well as on those who were not carriers of a BRCA1/2 mutation has found cancer risk of...
Will Checkpoint Inhibitors Be Winners in Hematologic Cancers, Too?
A “Featured Topic” session during the 56th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition drew a standing-room-only crowd to hear two experts weigh in on checkpoint blockade in hematologic malignancies. While new to hematology, these drugs—the cytotoxic T-lymphocyte–associated...
Breast Health Global Initiative Tackles Third-World Health Care
Benjamin O. Anderson, MD, is the Director of the Breast Health Global Initiative (BHGI) and surgical oncologist and Director of the Breast Health Clinic at the University of Washington in Seattle. The ASCO Post recently spoke with Dr. Anderson about the conceptual framework of the...
Appointments and Awards Announced at The Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center
The Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center in Baltimore recently announced new appointments and awards given to faculty. New Director of Thoracic Oncology Julie Brahmer, MD, a medical oncologist with expertise in the use of immunotherapies to treat lung cancer, has been named...
Expert Point of View: Amy H. Comander, MD
Amy H. Comander, MD, a medical oncologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Boston, told The ASCO Post that the findings will clearly help her in counseling patients. “I am excited to be able to discuss the study with my...
Low-Fat Diet Reduces Mortality in Breast Cancer Subset
The final survival analysis of the landmark Women’s Intervention Nutrition Study (WINS) confirmed that a low-fat diet can reduce the risk of dying for a subset of breast cancer patients.1 At the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, Rowan T. Chlebowski, MD, PhD, of the Los Angeles Biomedical...
Highlights From the 2015 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium
The 2015 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium was held January 15 to 17. Direct your patients to www.cancer.net/blog to read the latest research on the treatment of colorectal cancer, including what it means for patient care. On the Cancer.Net blog, your patients can also listen to a podcast...
Palliative Care in the Middle East
While some seek peace in the Middle East through political means, others are looking to help patients with cancer find peace through palliative care. This endeavor is bringing oncology professionals together across the region’s national borders and cultural boundaries to implement solutions and...
Oncologists, Pathologists Partner to Improve Practice and Optimize Patient Care
The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the College of American Pathologists (CAP) have announced a new partnership to optimize patient care and foster excellence in the practices of pathology and oncology through interprofessional education, advocacy, quality improvement,...
Treatment Paradigm in Advanced Melanoma Poised for Change… Again
In the treatment of advanced/metastatic melanoma, recent debate has focused on the choice of initial therapy: ipilimumab (Yervoy) or, for patients with BRAF-mutant cancer, a BRAF/MEK inhibitor. This issue is now taking a back seat to the emerging conversation about the positioning of antibodies...
