Preventing Nerve Damage
EVEN AFTER CHEMOTHERAPY ENDS, patients often experience tingling, pain and numbness in their arms, legs, hands and feet. These symptoms—caused by nerve damage called peripheral neuropathy—can impair a...
View ArticleADCs Make Their Mark
IN 2009, SHEILA MARIE JOHNSON SNEEZED at her desk and noticed a burning sensation in her chest. “I thought, ‘That was weird,’” she recalls. A week or two later, with another sneeze, it happened again....
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Ovarian Cancer: A Quest to Extend Remissions
ANDIE, WHO ASKED THAT HER REAL NAME NOT BE USED, WAS DIAGNOSED WITH OVARIAN CANCER in April 2020 at age 52. She had visited her primary care doctor a few months earlier after feeling strangely...
View ArticleChoosing Between Lung Cancer Surgery and Radiation
NON-SMALL CELL LUNG CANCER REPRESENTS the majority of lung cancer cases in the U.S., about 85%, and about 12% of all cancers. Treatment for early-stage lung cancers is typically surgery to remove the...
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Living With Chronic Blood Cancer
TOWARD THE END OF 2014, 52-year-old Doreen Zetterlund was experiencing muscle spasms in her neck and shoulders. She also had a lump on the side of her neck but chalked up her symptoms to stress. When...
View ArticleImmunotherapy: When Is Sooner Better Than Later?
JUST AFTER LABOR DAY in 2019, Sascha Roth, who was 38 years old, was diagnosed with stage III rectal cancer. Roth co-owns and operates Urban Country Designs, a furniture and interior design company in...
View ArticleDiaphragm Disturbances
WHILE MOST PEOPLE have had a case of hiccups they can’t shake, people undergoing certain treatments for cancer may have more than their fair share of this annoyance. One 2021 study published in the...
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Immunotherapy Gets Personal
William G. Nelson, MD, PhD Photo by Joe Rubino THE HUMAN GENOME COMPRISES more than 6 million DNA base pairs organized into 23 chromosome pairs, containing the “blueprints” for proteins encoded by...
View ArticleGermline Genetic Testing Lags Behind Guidelines
GERMLINE GENETIC TESTING following a cancer diagnosis can help determine a patient’s risk of developing other cancers and assess heightened cancer risk among their immediate family members. Germline...
View ArticleIs Chemo-free Treatment Coming for HER2-positive Breast Cancer?
NEARLY 20% OF BREAST CANCER PATIENTS have HER2-positive cancer, meaning their tumors have high levels of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 protein. This cancer can grow quickly and generally...
View ArticleFinding Answers in Prostate Cancer
PROSTATE CANCER CONTINUES TO TAKE A TOLL. About one in eight men in the U.S. will be diagnosed with the disease in his lifetime, according to the American Cancer Society. After lung cancer, prostate...
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Moving the Needle on Metastatic Breast Cancer
DAR FINKELSTEIN WOKE in the middle of the night in June 2019 with a sharp pain across her chest and suspected she was having a heart attack. “I woke my husband and said, ‘I think we need to get to the...
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Controlling Peripheral Neuropathy
AS A NURSE, Brenda Oehler knew about the possible side effects of her chemotherapy treatments. Oehler, the director of nursing operations at UnityPoint Health – St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids,...
View ArticleIs Immunotherapy Safe in People With HIV?
NEW RESEARCH shows immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) are just as effective and safe in cancer patients living with HIV as in those who do not have HIV. Providers have long been wary about using ICIs...
View ArticleCDK4/6 Inhibitors in Early-stage Breast Cancer
NEARLY 70% of people with breast cancer have the hormone receptor (HR)-positive, HER2-negative subtype of the disease and will choose among a variety of treatment regimens, including combinations of...
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Cancer Treatment: Can Less Be More?
William G. Nelson, MD, PhD Photo by Joe Rubino AN EXTRAORDINARY WAVE OF PROGRESS against cancer has occurred in the United States over the past three decades. From its peak in 1991, cancer mortality...
View ArticleEmerging Treatments for Brain Metastases in Breast Cancer
CAREY ANDERS, A MEDICAL ONCOLOGIST at Duke Cancer Center in Durham, North Carolina, paused at her slide that listed treatments for central nervous system (CNS) tumors. She encouraged attendees and...
View ArticleCAR T-cell Therapy: Understanding the Warning and the Risks
CHIMERIC ANTIGEN RECEPTOR (CAR) T-CELL THERAPY, a personalized form of immunotherapy that modifies a patient’s immune system to target and kill cancer cells, has been lifesaving for many people with...
View ArticleNon-surgical Options in Bladder Cancer
FOR DECADES, the standard of care for muscle-invasive bladder cancer has been chemotherapy to shrink the tumor followed by surgery to remove the bladder. But a recent clinical trial found adding...
View ArticlePreventing Blood Clots
BLOOD CLOTS are a leading cause of death in people with cancer, second only to cancer itself. People with cancer have nine times the clotting risk of people without cancer. Blood clots can serve an...
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