Maggie L. Shaw

By 2030, heart failure—which tops the list of reasons for hospitalization among individuals older than 65 years—could tax the healthcare system $69.8 billion each year. Study results show the success of palliative care at reducing both healthcare costs and hospitalization.

Social determinants found within a person’s environment, mainly where they live and work, have been shown to influence outcomes related to health, functioning, and quality of life, especially where risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) is concerned, according to study results that will be presented during ACC.20/WCC Virtual.

Metastatic disease is the leading cause of death in the over 600,000 individuals worldwide who die of breast cancer each year. A new blood-based assay to detect minimal residual disease (MRD) in patients with stage 0 to 3 breast cancer was shown to have 100-fold greater sensitivity compared with digital droplet polymerase chain reaction.

A primary analysis of data from the GeparOcto trial showed no difference in pathologic complete response among patients with early-stage breast cancer enrolled in 2 neoadjuvant treatment arms: sequential intense dose-dense epirubicin, paclitaxel, and cyclophosphamide and weekly paclitaxel and nonpegylated liposomal doxorubicin.

Patients who undergo neoadjuvant chemotherapy tend to be younger, with larger tumors and greater nodal involvement. But differences in their 30- and 90-day mortality rates compared with those of patients treated adjuvantly are clinically insignificant.

Patients with cardiovascular disease are especially vulnerable to respiratory infections, although uncertainty remains on just what damage COVID-19 can cause in these patients. The flu season is also in full swing, with an estimated 440,000 individuals hospitalized so far in the United States alone, according to the CDC.

A second individual may have been cured of HIV following an allogeneic stem-cell transplant for stage 4b refractory Hodgkin lymphoma with Δ32-mutated cells, which are resistant to the virus. These cells did not express the CCR5 chemokine receptor, 1 of 2 methods of entry for HIV into a host cell.

The theme of ACCC Immediate Past President Ali McBride, PharmD, MS, BPS, BCOP, for his 2019-2020 term was “Collaborate. Educate. Compensate: A Prescription for Sustainable Cancer Care Delivery.” Nowhere was that more evident than in the panel discussion he led on day 2 of this year’s annual conference.

Can we predict which patients are at high risk of hospitalization? How can we reduce this risk? Debra Patt, MD, MPH, MBA, executive vice president of policy and strategy at Texas Oncology, posed these questions during the ACCC 46th Annual Meeting and Cancer Center Business Summit.

Healthcare is not political, it’s personal, Senator Debbie Stabenow, D-Michigan, told an audience at the ACCC 46th Annual Meeting and Cancer Center Business Summit, imploring them to come together in a nonpartisan way to improve care access and quality and to reduce costs.

Evolution. Disruption. Innovation. Telemedicine. A virtual exchange of information. Healthcare has lagged behind in these aspects, but it’s necessary to transcend time and distance, according to Susan Dentzer, senior policy fellow at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy.

Thirty-seven percent of women prefer to receive their lifetime risk of breast cancer through numbers and words, while 73% prefer a combination of lifetime and 10-year age-related risk.

Eighty percent of annual costs for heart failure come from hospitalization for the condition, which more than 23 million persons suffer from worldwide, 6.2 million (27%) in the United States alone. These costs are estimated to increase almost 58% between 2012 and 2030, from $30.7 billion to $53 billion.

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) has contributed to more US patient deaths than the next 60 reportable infectious diseases combined. The United States Preventive Services Task Force has issued updated guidelines on screening for HCV that account for the larger proportion of this patient group that now includes persons who inject drugs, as well as the shift from interferon-based therapy to regimens composed of direct-acting antiviral (DAA) medications.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) occurs at a higher rate in individuals who have HIV compared with those who do not, and it has a global incidence of more than 380 million people. The progressive lung disease is also diagnosed at a younger age in HIV-positive persons compared with their HIV-negative counterparts, and higher rates of smoking may be to blame.

Updated results from the EASEL study show that lower risks of cardiovascular (CV) events, CV death, and CV mortality accompany initiation of canagliflozin, a sodium glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitor, in patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D) and high CV risk compared with use of other drugs.

Health-related quality of life (QOL) improved in 54% of patients 18 years or older with relapsed/refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (R/R DLBCL) after therapy with tisagenlecleucel (Kymriah; Novartis), one of 2 FDA-approved chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies. The patients’ general health, vitality, physical function, and social function improved the most.

Recommendations abound for when women at average risk for breast cancer should begin yearly mammography screening, ranging from age 40 to 50. Questions remain, however, on the optimal age at which to stop. However, with over 50% of women older than age 75 still undergoing mammography, is there a truly safe age at which to stop what has been shown to be a life-saving practice if it does not decrease their mortality from breast cancer?

Circulation, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Heart Association, just released its fourth annual Go Red for Women issue, in which researchers from the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai note the stark disparities in how heart disease manifests in women and men. For women, sudden cardiac death is often the first sign they even have heart disease.

Radium-223’s (Ra-223) low levels of alpha particle radiation induce double-strand DNA breaks, which leads to cell apoptosis. Sipuleucel-T (SipT), which is an immunotherapy manufactured from a patient’s peripheral blood mononuclear cells, activates T cells to spur an immune response. Both are used to treat bone-metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). Study data suggest a synergistic immune effect when Ra-223 is added to treatment with SipT.

Close to 80% of HIV-positive individuals are shown to be virally suppressed through their most recent test results, according to data from 2016 through 2018, as well as 32% to 63% of adults older than 24 years. Youth with a new HIV diagnosis, however, come in at only 12%.

Flow cytometry (FCM), next-generation sequencing, (NGS), and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) are the 3 most common methods clinicians use to diagnose minimal residual disease (MRD) in patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia who have undergone chemotherapy, radiotherapy, or immunotherapy. MRD can be found both in bone marrow via aspiration and peripheral blood circulation through a draw.

The 5-year survival rate for triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is about 77%. The recurrence rate is highest in the first 3 years after treatment, but falls off at the 5-year mark—although the survival rate at this time point tends to be lower. Because TNBC cells lack the hormone receptors for estrogen and progesterone and do not overexpress the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 gene, treatment often involves chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. Targeted treatments are not used with TNBC.

Among the general population of the United States, 14.5% of HIV-positive individuals do not know their disease status. This rate increases to 51.5% of 13- to 24-year-olds, among whom men who have sex with men account for 80% of new HIV infections.

There are more than 36 million smokers in the United States today, and most (70%) admit they want to quit. Individuals who decide to quit see a smaller risk of heart disease within 1 to 2 years, along with reduced risks of stroke and peripheral vascular disease. However, annual deaths from smoking still exceed 480,000 in the United States, where over 16 million live with smoking-related diseases that include infertility, lung cancer, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

In 2017, heart failure contributed to 1 in 8 deaths. This inability of the heart to function at its optimal level led to an estimated $30.7 billion in annual healthcare costs in 2012, including healthcare services, medicines, and missed work.

Anti-CD19 chimeric antigen receptor natural killer (CAR NK) cells, derived from donor umbilical cord blood, produced a 73% objective response rate in 11 patients with lymphoid tumors who received just 1 dose of the infused therapy, with no occurrences of cytokine release syndrome or neurotoxicity, in preliminary study results out of MD Anderson. Seven patients had a complete remission.

Antiretroviral treatment (ART) is the regimen mainstay for everyone who has HIV, irrespective of infection duration. More than twice as many options for ART were available in 2018 as were offered in 2012—but this did not equal cheaper prices. Between 2012 and 2018, the average wholesale price for initial ART jumped 34% for most people with HIV.

Three proteasome inhibitors (PIs) are approved for patients with multiple myeloma (MM): Bortezomib, a first-in class PI, fights both newly diagnosed and relapsed/refractory MM (RRMM); carfilzomib, a next-generation PI, treats RRMM as both a monotherapy and in combination; and ixazomib, the first oral PI, treats RRMM in combination. PIs work by preventing the proteasomes in cancerous plasma cells from “recycling” what is essentially garbage protein.

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells are a patient’s own, harvested and reengineered to attack specific malignant cells. They were initially developed using knowledge gleaned from allogeneic stem cell transplants: that donor mature immune cells can attack healthy cells in the recipient patient.