Tag Archives: nursing

Cancer experience presents time for lifestyle changes in both survivors and family members

“A window of opportunity exists during the post-treatment transition period for oncology clinicians to reach out to patients and their caregivers who want to have a healthy start on life after cancer,” said Susan Mazanec, PhD, RN, AOCN, assistant professor at Case Western Reserve’s Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing. Mazanec, also a nurse scientist at University Hospitals Case Medical Center’s Seidman Cancer Center, was lead investigator of the study, “Health Behaviors in Family Members of Patients Completing Cancer Treatment,” recently reported in Oncology Nursing Forum. Mazanec and colleagues surveyed and interviewed 50 patients diagnosed with breast, colorectal, head and neck, lung or prostate cancers and 38 caregivers within three week of a patient’s last treatment. The questions were designed to gauge family members’ intention, perceived benefit and confidence about eating a healthy diet, physical activity and smoking cessation…

Study may lead to early detection, better outcomes for lymphedema patients — ScienceDaily

The study is testing bioimpedance spectroscopy, a device where electrodes are placed on the patient’s arms so that the fluid buildup can be accurately measured. The randomized study is enrolling 1,100 research subjects over two years at five sites in the United States and Australia. “Many in the health care community, and even breast cancer patients, don’t understand that this lifelong arm swelling is a possible result of breast cancer treatment, but others of us have been working on this issue for decades,” said principal investigator Sheila H. …

Exercise boosts tumor-fighting ability of chemotherapy, team finds

Their work, performed in a mouse model of melanoma, found that combining exercise with chemotherapy shrunk tumors more than chemotherapy alone. Joseph Libonati, an associate professor in the School of Nursing and director of the Laboratory of Innovative and Translational Nursing Research, was the senior author on the study, which appears in the American Journal of Physiology. His collaborators included Penn Nursing’s Geetha Muthukumaran, Dennis Ding and Akinyemi Bajulaiye plus Kathleen Sturgeon, Keri Schadler, Nicholas J. …

Surviving survival

In the largest study of its kind, researchers led by the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing have investigated the caregivers of 186 mothers to childhood brain tumor survivors aged 14-40 whose care needs last long into adulthood. They based their research on a model containing factors central to nursing practice, namely the caregiver, the survivor, and the family. They discovered that a complex interaction among components of the model, the health of the caregivers, the demands experienced by the caregiver, the caregiver’s perceptions about the health of the survivor, and the family’s support interact to explain how the caregiver assesses herself in her role. …