Persuing ASCO 2017 - AKA Time for Lorazepam

Photo from ASCO Mediakit. © ASCO/Danny Morton 2017TheAnnual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology was last week. It ’s been my observation over the years that much of the best palliative-oncology and supportive-oncology research is presented at ASCO each year, before it’s actually published (if it ever gets published).  So I always dig through the palliative/EOL/supportive/psychooncology abstracts each year to see what ' s happening. Below is a gently annotated list of the abstracts that caught my eye the most, for your perusal and edification. Undoubtedly, these are my idiosyncratic choices, and if you want to dig through all of them you canbrowse the abstracts by category here.  A couple additional comments first.One of the big headline trials was asupportive oncology trial showing that regular tablet-based symptom assessment in cancer patients prolongs survival.  Christian promises me he ' s going to do a deep dive into the symptom tablet trial so I won ' t really talk about it here.  It ’s interesting however to compare it to one of the other major headlines which was about abiraterone for advanced prostate cancer. People went nuts for this study, although if you dig into the results they’re pretty modest (3 year survival 83% in the abiraterone vs 76% in the placebo group), but in cancer trials that’s typical. I’m not knocking the study, they are good results, I’d undoubtedly do abiraterone myself, but there...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Care Tags: ASCO cancer oncology pallonc research research issues rosielle WaPo Source Type: blogs