Moscone Center

We’re getting ready for the 2012 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium next week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Kim Ryan, Nancy Roach, and I will be there checking out the latest colon and rectal cancer prevention and treatment research and talking with leaders in the colorectal cancer field.

Colon and rectal cancer is featured on Saturday, January 21, but we’ll also be looking at research results for cancers in the upper digestive tract, liver, and pancreas on Thursday and Friday, visiting exhibits, and meeting with members of the Fight Colorectal Cancer Medical Advisory Board.

• Watch for our reports from the Symposium on the Fight Colorectal Cancer Research and Treatment News.
• Follow our tweets on Twitter @FightCRC.
• In February, join us and Dr. Dan Sargent from the Mayo Clinic for a Report from the 2012 GI Cancers Symposium webinar. Read the rest of this entry »

Update from the 2009 Gastrointestinal Cancer Symposium

African Americans in both a large national database of colorectal cancer patients and in records of a Philadelphia hospital were more likely to be diagnosed at an advanced stage and have poorer survival at every stage than white patients.

Researchers at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadephia studied information from nearly 245,000 colon and rectal cancer patients from the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database. They compared that information to 20 years worth of data in the Jefferson University Hospital tumor registry for 2,500 patients treated from 1988 through 2007. Read the rest of this entry »

I am sitting at the Oakland airport waiting for my flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles going home from the Gastrointestinal Cancer Symposium. This is the only GI symposium in the United States which brings together all the experts dealing with patients with GI cancer, including surgeons, radiation oncologists, medical oncologists, gastroenterologists, and scientists.

We all realize that it takes a team to provide the best care, particularly with novel developments in technologies such as virtual colonoscopies, new drugs, new surgical techniques and new insights on cancer risk and prevention strategies. Read the rest of this entry »