Tag Archives: group

Childhood cancer survivors suffer long-term symptoms linked to poor quality of life

"The prevalence of these symptoms accounts for a huge variance in physical, mental and social domains of quality of life among survivors," said I-Chan Huang, Ph.D., an associate professor of health outcomes and policy in the UF College of Medicine and the lead author of the study. "If we think symptoms are the key to patients’ quality of life, then if we can better manage their symptoms, we can improve their daily functional status and quality of life." Huang, also a member of UF’s Institute for Child Health Policy, teamed with researchers from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis to conduct the study, which was published in the Nov. 20 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology…

Better guidelines, coordination needed for prostate cancer specialists

In an article published online today in the journal Urologic Oncology, urologist Ralph de Vere White and medical oncologist Primo Lara, Jr. of the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center describe a framework for urology and medical oncology interactions to enhance patient care, improve outcomes and yield clinical research advances…

Criteria shows one year death risk at time of hospital admission

"There are many prognostic indices, but until now none meant to be used immediately upon hospital admission," says Stacy Fischer, MD, CU Cancer Center investigator and assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. "Basically, with five criteria — none of which require obtaining labs or data gathering — we can accurately predict who is at low, medium and high risk for death within a year," says Jeanie Youngwerth, MD, CU Cancer Center investigator and Palliative Care specialist at the University of Colorado Hospital and School of Medicine. …

Protien Cyclin D1 governs microRNA processing in breast cancer

"In addition to its role in regulating the cell cycle, cyclin D1 induces Dicer and thereby promotes the maturation of miRNA," says lead researcher Richard Pestell, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University and Chair of the Department of Cancer Biology. Dicer is a protein that converts inactive hairpin-structured microRNA precursors into their active single stranded form. "The work supports the idea that cancer-causing proteins like cyclin D1 may drive cancer progression in part via miRNA biogenesis." Using antisense RNA, Dr. Pestell’s group was the first to show that cyclin D1 drives mammary tumor growth in vivo. …

Untreated cancer pain a ‘scandal of global proportions,’ survey shows

The results from the Global Opioid Policy Initiative (GOPI) project show that more than 4 billion people live in countries where regulations leave cancer patients suffering excruciating pain. National governments must take urgent action to improve access to these medicines, says the European Society for Medical Oncology, leader of a group of 22 partners that have launched the first global survey to evaluate the availability and accessibility of opioids for cancer pain management. "The GOPI study has uncovered a pandemic of over-regulation in much of the developing world that is making it catastrophically difficult to provide basic medication to relieve strong cancer pain," says Nathan Cherny, Chair of the ESMO Palliative Care Working Group and lead author of the report, from Shaare Zedek Medical Center, Jerusalem, Israel. "Most of the world’s population lacks the necessary access to opioids for cancer pain management and palliative care, as well as acute, post-operative, obstetric and chronic pain." "When one considers that effective treatments are cheap and available, untreated cancer pain and its horrendous consequences for patients and their families is a scandal of global proportions," Cherny says…

Oral drug may improve survival in men with metastatic prostate cancer

The study, published on Nov. 19, 2013, in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, adds long-term survival and safety data for the drug tasquinimod, a new candidate for treating advanced and recurrent prostate cancer. “While all subgroups in the clinical trial benefited from tasquinimod, those whose cancer metastasized to their bones had the greatest benefit in terms of delaying the time from the start of treatment to when the cancer progressed,” said lead author Andrew J…