Cancer survival around the world

An interesting study measuring trends in cancer survival between 2000 and 2014 found, unsurprisingly, that patients in more developed countries had better survival. For women diagnosed with breast cancer between 2010 and 2014, 5-year survival rates reached 89.5% in Australia and 90.2% in the United States, but generally varied worldwide and remained low in some…

The effect of medication nonadherence on progression-free survival among patients with renal cell carcinoma

Along with my co-authors Jeff Sullivan, Jacki Chou, Michael Neely, Justin Doan, and Ross Maclean I am happy to announce to publication our paper “The effect of medication nonadherence on progression-free survival among patients with renal cell carcinoma” in Cancer Management and Research.  The abstract is below. Objective: To examine how observed medication nonadherence to 2…

Off-label use of cancer drugs

When each drug is approved by the FDA, the drug is not approved to treat all patients.  Each drug receives an “indication” which basically represents the types of patients the drug can treat.  Giving the treatment to patients with said indication is known as “on label” prescribing. Drugs developed to treat one disease may sometimes…

Too many trials, not enough patients

As research in new cancer treatments has grown, scientists may have run into a serious roadblock: there many not be enough patients to fill the needed clinical trials.  As the New York Times reports: There are too many experimental cancer drugs in too many clinical trials, and not enough patients to test them on. The logjam…

It’s Okay to Be a Coward about Cancer

That is the title of an interesting Time article from cancer surviver Josh Friedman. Friedman is a well-known screenwriter whose work includes credits for such franchises as Terminator, Avatar and War of the Worlds. The article was prompted in part by John McCain’s recent brain cancer diagnosis (glioblastoma to be specific). One excerpt is especially…

A cancer tool to improve survival?

A recent paper by Basch et al. 2017, found that electronic patient-reported symptom monitoring improved patient overall survival by 5 months.  This finding came from a randomized clinical trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering. For patients in the arm with electronic patient-reported symptom monitoring, when “…participants reported a severe or worsening symptom, an email alert was triggered to a clinical…