Colorectal Cancer News in Brief: July 31

Get help managing the financial costs of your cancer care from an ASCO booklet or figure out how to deal with the Medicare prescription doughnut hole using an AARP online calculator.

In research, Lynch syndrome women have excellent survival after ovarian cancer, older patients have similar effectiveness and side effects from Avastin, and parents with advanced cancer often underestimate how upset their children are.  Long-term cancer survivors have no more depression than people without cancer.

Research Reports

• Women with Lynch syndrome-related ovarian cancer have survival rates twice that of  their peers.  More than 80 percent of women with a mutation in one of the mismatch repair genes MLH1, MSH2 or MSH6 were diagnosed at stage 1 or 2, and ten year cancer-specific survival was 80 percent, compared to 40 percent in women without mutations.  Lifetime risk of getting ovarian cancer for Lynch patients was 10 percent, and combined with the excellent survival rate gave all Lynch women a 2 percent risk of dying of ovarian cancer.  Eli Marie Grindedal and colleagues in multiple European centers reported their analysis in the Journal on Medical Genetics, online first July 26, 2009.
• Older patients treated with Avastin® (bevacizumab) have as good progression-free survival as younger people and no worse side effects.  In analysis presented by Eric Van Cutsem, MD, at the ESMO Gastrointestinal Cancer Congress in June in Barcelona, there was no additional gastrointestinal perforation, postoperative bleeding, wound-healing complications, or hypertension in patients over 65.  However, patients who were 75 or older did have more blood clots and protein in their urine, possibly related to pre-existing illness.
• Parents who have advanced cancer often don’t recognize how distressed their children are.  Families used distraction and trying to maintain normality to cope with a parent’s cancer, but children had increased responsibilities and reduced social activity.  Both parents and children said that cancer had led to stronger relationships and learning to value family members and the important things in life.  Vida L. Kennedy and Mari Lloyd-Williams discuss their interviews with families in the August 2009 issue of Psycho-Oncology.
• Long term cancer survivors (more than 5 years) have no more major depression than people without cancer.  However, depression may cause more difficulties for them in their home, social, and work lives. William Pirl writes about a national survey in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, early release July 27, 2009.

Other Headlines

• Using Medicare Part D for your prescription drugs? AARP has developed an online calculator to let you know how soon you might hit the “doughnut hole” where you have to pay the full cost of each prescription.  In addition, the calculator can tell you what less expensive drugs might be available to reduce your costs and postpone the doughnut hole.
• Cancer.net, the ASCO website for patients and families, has an excellent booklet to help you with Managing the Cost of Cancer Care.  It encourages you to  talk to your doctor about the cost of your cancer care without embarrassment and from the beginning of your treatment.  It is also available en Espanol.