Tag Archives: medically

Economic factors may affect getting guideline-recommended breast cancer treatment

Women with a break in their insurance coverage had a 3.5-fold higher likelihood of nonconcordance with National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines for radiation therapy and chemotherapy compared with women with uninterrupted coverage. "We found that women who had no insurance at some point during treatment, women with lower incomes compared with those in the highest income categories, and women who held more debt at the time of diagnosis were less likely to receive all of the recommended breast cancer treatments," said Jean A…

Customizing treatments for deadly prostate cancer with tumor genomics

"Men with castration-resistant prostate cancer have abysmal survival rates, typically living an average of two years once hormone therapies fail," says Manish Kohli, M.D., a Mayo Clinic oncologist and principal investigator of the Prostate Cancer Medically Optimized Genome-Enhanced Therapy (PROMOTE) study. Dr. Kohli says the poor prognosis for men with this cancer highlights the need for studies like PROMOTE, which seek to match new targeted drugs with the genomic characteristics of individual patients’ tumors. Several new therapies have recently been approved by the FDA for use in treating castration-resistant prostate cancer, offering new hope for men with this disease. …