Oncology

As cancer care becomes more powerful and people survivor longer, cancer is becoming a chronic disease that patients need to learn how to live with and remain productive. Although the role of payers in survivorship isn't fully baked yet, there is more focus in the area, according to Ira Klein, MD, MBA, FACP, chief medical officer at Aetna.

The Patient-Centered Oncology Care 2014 meeting started off with a talk by Marian Grant, DNP, RN, CRNP, of the University of Maryland School of Nursing, on the topic of palliative care. Although palliative care is appropriate for patients of all ages and in any stage of a serious illness and can be provided alongside curative or disease-modifying treatments, she says she often gets called in very late to offer palliative care to patients.

In 2 interviews with Physicians' Education Resource, LLC, award-winning journalist Joan Lunden and Patrick I. Borgen, MD, of Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY, discuss breast cancer in advance of the 32nd Annual Miami Breast Cancer Conference.

The retrospective analysis conducted in stage 3 and 4 immunotherapy-treated melanoma patients found that the development of vitiligo could serve as a clinical marker for effective antimelanoma immunity and improved clinical outcome.

CMO Steven Miller has already started working with oncologists as the company plans the process of steering physicians to use preferred drugs.

A telehealth intervention experiment in head and neck cancer patients was found to relive some posttreatment distress symptoms.

A study conducted in Connecticut showed that ultrasound identified an additional 3.2 women in a 1000 with breast cancer, following a negative mammogram. This has raised a debate on the utility of a screening ultrasound.

The study found an increased risk of cancer, contradicting some earlier evidence that suggests the opposite.

In Tuesday night's State of the Union address, President Barack Obama did not spend a lot of time discussing healthcare, but he did highlight medical research and a growing field of medicine by announcing his new Precision Medicine Initiative.

A major technical partner is announced for the long-awaited HIT initiative that will give oncologists a data-derived "second opinion" right from their desktops, with the earliest versions scheduled to come online this year.

Karyl Blaseg, RN, MS, OCN, writes about the important role of patient navigators in preventing healthcare disparities and promoting patient-centered care among cancer patients.

Existing cancer therapies are geared toward massacring tumor cells, but researchers propose a different strategy: subtly hardening cancer cells to prevent them from invading new areas of the body. They devised a way of screening compounds for the desired effect and have identified a compound that shows promise in fighting pancreatic cancer.

For people who have cancer, patient-centered care is particularly important because their life is changing, said Amy Berman, RN, BS, senior program officer at the John A. Hartford Foundation, who also has stage 4 breast cancer.

In it's report, "Clinical Cancer Advances 2015: ASCO's Annual Report on Progress Against Cancer," published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, 4 newly approved treatments for CLL were predicted to have a dramatic impact on patients with the disease.

The study conducted at the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology studied IncRNAs and their role in cancer.

The CEO of Kite Pharma plans to initiate early conversations with insurers, even before the launch of a clinical trial of their experimental drug, to ensure smooth sailing once the product is approved and launched.

Researchers at the University of Maryland are evaluating the value of a person's spit to screen for lung cancer, replacing the traditional and recently recommended CT scan.