New Clinic for High-Risk Prostate Cancer Patients at the University of Michigan

This report is interesting on a few counts. Recall that it's now rather common to refer to cancer as a chronic disease. By this it is meant that, for most patients, the disease can be managed well and is not life-threatening. I would amend this statement to say that cancer, except the high-risk varieties, can be treated as a chronic disease. At least at the University of Michigan, they are now separating some of these high-risk patients out into a separate clinic. This identification/separation process is accomplished with the Gleason score, PSA testing, cancer staging, and, more recently, next generation genomic screening (NGS) of the tumor tissue. Here's a quote from the article above about this latter approach: Patients also receive free cancer genome sequencing along with several recently introduced predictive genetic tests. Several other key aspects of the special care that these high-risk prostate cancer patients receive is also mentioned in the article. The first is that they are diagnosed and treated with multidisciiplinary teams (see: Multidisciplinary Diagnostic Teams and Integrated Diagnostic Centers; Cleveland Clinic Use of Multidisciplinary Teams; Salaried Physicians Deemed Essential). The value of these MDTs is that the instincts of individual specialists (e.g., oncologic surgeons, oncologists, radiation therapists) are suppressed in favor of overall team recommendations. The second is access to survivorship services (see: Cancer ...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Pathologists Authors: Tags: Healthcare Delivery Hospitals and Healthcare Delivery Medical Research Source Type: blogs