On Wednesday night, Dr. Lindsey Poppe, the Pharmacy Clinical Manager for Oncology for the University of North Carolina hospital system talked about the alternatives and options that patients have when directly faced with the current chemo drug shortage.
Webinar: What to Do When Your Doc is Out of 5-FU from Fight Colorectal Cancer on Vimeo.
Dr. Edith Mitchell
Last night, Dr. Edith Mitchell of Thomas Jefferson University Kimmel Cancer Center in Philadelphia, PA, updated colorectal cancer patients on the latest research and treatment news in an online webinar.
Dr. Mitchell highlighted the most important news for colon and rectal cancer patients to come from the 2011 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium held in San Francisco last month. She answer such questions as…
“Can doctors determine the chances that my cancer may return?”
“Can my doctors determine if I need chemotherapy?”
“Does Avastin or Erbitux benefit my stage III cancer treatment?”
“Are there any promising new treatments on the horizon?”
Very real.
Brain MRI’s before and chemotherapy found changes in brains of women being treated for breast cancer.
Women who had breast cancer surgery but didn’t have chemo had similar changes, but they were less severe. Brains of healthy women remained stable.
Changes were in gray matter in areas of the brain involving memory and the ability to process information.
A year later most– but not all — areas of the brain had returned to normal. Read the rest of this entry »
It doesn’t hurt to stop XELOX chemotherapy combined with Avastin after six treatments and continue with Avastin alone until colorectal cancer gets worse, according to a study reported at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago.
Many patients have to stop oxaliplatin chemotherapy with before getting its maximum effectiveness because of peripheral neuropathy — tingling, numbness, or pain in their hands and feet. Xeloda® (capecitabine) can cause painful skin redness and cracking on the hands and feet or hand-foot syndrome, which can also affect time on chemotherapy.
Giving only six treatments of Avastin® (bevacizumab) plus XELOX chemotherapy and then stopping XELOX and using only Avastin until cancer progressed was as effective for the initial or first-line treatment of colorectal cancer as continuing XELOX. XELOX combines Xeloda® (capecitabine) with oxaliplatin.
In addition, the strategy reduced both severe peripheral neuropathy and hand-foot syndrome.
Colorectal cancer patients 65 and older without other serious medical problems benefitted when Avastin® (bevacizumab) was added to chemotherapy.
Combining results of four randomized clinical trials of Avastin and chemotherapy in patients with advanced colorectal cancer, researchers found that adding Avastin increased both the time older patients lived and the time before their cancer got worse.
Patients who were 70 and older had similar improvements. Read the rest of this entry »
