December 2010, Vol 3, No 8

This past April, Geisinger Medical Center’s (GMC) Cancer Institute became one of 14 sites added to the National Cancer Institute Community Cancer Centers Program (NCCCP). Joining this national network of community cancer centers offers GMC the opportunity to expand its state-of-the-art cancer care and research in northeast Pennsylvania.

Medication safety is an ongoing challenge for hospitals, healthcare providers, and healthcare delivery systems. Medication errors in hospitals are common^1,2 and can lead to patient harm. A study by Leape and colleagues found that serious medication errors occurred most often in physician ordering (39%) and nurse administration (38%). The remaining 23% occurred during transcription (12%) and pharmacy dispensing (11%).³

SAN FRANCISCO—America must take a more logical approach to healthcare, or the whole system for providing it will collapse, warned Otis W. Brawley, MD, chief medicine and science officer at the American Cancer Society.

“I spend a lot of time talking about the rational use of healthcare, not the rationing,” said Brawley, who also serves as an Emory University professor of oncology, hematology, and medicine.

What important changes in recent years do those treating patients with lymphoma need to keep in focus? Those treating newly diagnosed T-cell lymphomas, according to Owen A. O’Connor, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and pharmacology and chief of the division of hematologic malignancies and medical oncology at the New York University Langone Medical Center Cancer Institute in New York City, need to enroll their patients in clinical trials of combinations of newer agents, and those treating mantle cell lymphomas can consider upfront autologous stem cell transplant (SCT).

SAN FRANCISCO—Poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitors are showing impressive potency against ovarian cancer in early clinical trials, according to Deborah Armstrong, MD, an associate professor of oncology, gynecology, and obstetrics at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.

MILAN—Breakthrough pain in cancer patients can be managed easily and effectively with fentanyl pectin nasal spray (FPNS), according to new data.

FPNS can be easily titrated to an effective dose and there is little need for rescue medication, according to David Brooks, MD, of Chesterfield and North Derbyshire Royal Hospital NHS Trust in Chesterfield, United Kingdom.

MILAN—Sexual issues related to cancer and its treatment are substantial—and do not seem to be resolving with the use of new molecular targeted agents instead of endocrine therapy and chemotherapy. This conclusion can be drawn from two studies presented by investigators from Argentina and France.

MILAN—Prolonging chemotherapy until disease progression improves progression- free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) in patients with metastatic breast cancer (MBC), according to a systematic analysis conducted in Italy.

The findings address an important debate in oncology, said Alessandra Gennari, MD, of Ospedali Galliera in Genova. “In metastatic breast cancer there is substantial controversy over how long chemotherapy should be continued in the absence of significant toxicity, after the achievement of disease control,” said Gennari.

Most people understand the importance of saving for retirement and want to save more, but do not know where to begin. Furthermore, the economic downturn has resulted in fewer people putting away money for retirement.