Articles
Pain relief is a right: building confidence in opioid use in oncology
Opioid analgesics are essential for pain relief and pain treatment in patients with active malignant disease. Yet, in 2011, the World Health Organization estimated that, worldwide, 5.5 million people living with terminal cancer suffered from moderate to severe pain, because…
Prostate cancer: new leads for deterring progression
Future prospects for tackling aggressive prostate cancer emerged from two presentations at the American Association for Cancer Research Annual meeting, held virtually in mid-April. One identified how the risk of prostate cancer progressing to lethal disease might be mitigated by…
PSA population screening is back in favour: here’s why
Five years ago, the idea of national screening programmes for prostate cancer had gone cold. The benefits of PSA (prostate specific antigen) blood testing, introduced as a screening tool in the 1980s, had long been fiercely debated. But by 2015…
Older, frail patients are still being let down by the regulators
Hans Wildiers is frustrated. “This drug is well-tolerated in older persons – this is a very frequent conclusion in publications. And it is often not a correct conclusion,” says the immediate past president of SIOG, the International Society of Geriatric…
Not too little, not too much… a lesson for cancer prevention from ancient civilisations
“If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.” This quotation from Hippocrates pops up regularly in writings advocating a…
Can gene therapy be made to work against solid tumours?
Gene therapy to treat cancer has been on the research agenda for three decades, with the first examples having been developed in the 1990s, according to Hrvoje Miletic, Senior Consultant in Neuropathology at the Bergen/Haukeland University Hospital in Norway. “But…
The oncologist-patients who share their unique insights
“I try not to think about it. However, a few times a day, I have moments of a few seconds when I feel like panic is taking over me. After a while everything passes, but I can't handle it very…
Our pathways: advocates provide roadmaps for patients, clinicians and managers
Patient advocates have a collective understanding of the patient pathway, from the first suspicious symptoms to the realities of life as a survivor, that is unrivalled by any professionals. They also understand better than anyone how valuable that knowledge and…
Natural killers: a new tactical unit joins the cancer immunotherapy brigade
There was a time when all that oncologists treating solid tumours needed to know about leukocytes was how to measure the damage that cytotoxic drugs inflicted on their patients’ white blood cell count and their capacity to fight off infections.…
Immunotherapy toxicities demand a joined up approach from oncologists and organ specialists
Adverse effects of cancer therapies have long been at the root of decision making for interventions in all modalities – surgery, radiotherapy and medical – and especially in the latter category of anti-cancer drugs. Most people have heard of some…