Diarrhea is a distressing condition that significantly affects patients’ quality of life and social functioning. Characterized by passage of more than three unformed stools in 24 hours, in cancer it can be caused by chemotherapy, radiotherapy, laxatives and antibiotics, enteral feeding, malabsorption syndromes, colectomy, or several types of malignant tumors. Diarrhea has also been reported in long-term cancer survivors. Standard treatment options such as opiate agonists and adsorbents are associated with side effects that may increase a patient’s symptom burden.
On July 14, 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved crizotinib (Xalkori®) for adult and pediatric patients aged 1 and older with unresectable, recurrent, or refractory inflammatory anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-positive myofibroblastic tumors (IMT).
Cancer has affected my family, and I believe that experience made me more empathetic toward my patients. As an undergraduate nursing student, I had the privilege of participating in the Susan D. Flynn Oncology Fellowship program, which truly enabled me to appreciate just how special oncology nursing is before I entered the workforce. I have and always will continue to carry the lessons I learned from the experience throughout my professional career, and the opportunity it opened for me to get involved in ONS gave me an incredible resource and community as I advance in my practice.
A greater increase in cancer survivorship may be an outcome from Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), according to study results published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in May 2022.
Launched in 2016 as a pilot program from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Innovation Center to develop new payment and delivery system models, the Oncology Care Model had a lofty goal: drive improvements in providing high-quality and cost-effective care.
As part of ongoing efforts to protect adolescents from tobacco, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched an education campaign to prevent e-cigarette use and vaping among America Indian and Alaska Native youth in June 2022.
Broad-based sex differences exist in the severity of side effects from cancer and its treatment, with female patients at an overall 34% higher risk for severe symptoms than male patients—and the risk jumps to nearly 50% for immunotherapies, researchers reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Symptom and pain assessment tools can measure multiple aspects of a patient’s pain experience in both ambulatory and acute care settings. My interest in symptom assessment began with to my work as an oncology nurse practitioner, when I witnessed how symptom management can make a positive difference in patients’ lives and ability to tolerate cancer treatment.
More than 1.7 million new invasive cancer cases were reported in the United States in 2019, according to the U.S. Cancer Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated in June 2022.
Emerging evidence has consistently shown that flushing central venous catheters with normal saline is comparable to heparin flushes in the adult care setting, leading to updated guideline recommendations that include saline as an alternative. But to date, only two studies have evaluated the two options in pediatric patients, the older of which found increased complications when used in children with leukemia or lymphoma. Is normal saline an acceptable alternative in that population?