(Press-News.org) Every year, nearly 45,000 Americans are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The odds against those stricken by the disease are truly dismal; pancreatic cancer almost always kills within two years after diagnosis, no matter how it is treated. Even aggressive intervention with chemotherapy, radiation or surgery rarely yields more than an extra month to a year of survival, depending on the stage of the disease.
This raises a tough question: should patients who know they are going to die soon spend a substantial amount of what little time they have left undergoing aggressive and difficult treatment — treatment likely to bring them only a brief period of additional life?
"It's about balancing quality and quantity of life, really," said Dr. Casey Boyd, a University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston surgery resident and lead author of a paper analyzing the problem in the current issue of Annals of Surgical Oncology. "For pancreatic cancer we know the quantity of life is short, so maximizing the quality of life is important — and the best way we can do that is to give patients concrete data that they can look at and use in their treatment decisions."
Boyd and her colleagues approached the issue by drawing on the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results database, examining SEER records for 25,476 pancreatic cancer patients and focusing on two factors that directly affect patients' lives: hospital days and days spent in medical care. (Hospital days were days spent as hospital inpatients, while medical care days included days in the hospital as well as other days on which the patient visited a physician, underwent a diagnostic test, or received a treatment).
"This study is the first to bring together hospital and medical care days in pancreatic cancer patients with stage, treatment and survival, and it gives us a quantitative look at the whole experience of a patient with pancreatic cancer," Boyd said. "We hope that physicians can use the information in this paper to give patients what they need to make critical decisions."
For example, Boyd said, a doctor could draw on the paper to counsel a patient with metastatic pancreatic cancer — the most common and deadly type. "The physician could say, if you have chemotherapy you may live four to six weeks longer, but a lot of that time you're going to be in the hospital, or getting a test, or getting a needle poked in your arm for your chemotherapy," she said. "Some patients may say, I want that, I want the most life that you can give me."
Others, she noted, might make a different choice if given an accurate picture of the treatment experience.
"They might say, it's not really worth it to me — it's a few extra weeks, but they may be miserable weeks," Boyd said. "They may decide not to have any treatment and maybe just have hospice, or just spend time with their family."
The ability to help patients make such difficult decisions was the main goal of the study, according to Boyd.
"Really, this paper is about empowering the patient," she said. "We want to provide them with the information they need to make their own personalized treatment decisions."
INFORMATION:
Other authors of the Annals of Surgical Oncology article include medical student Daniel Branch, assistant professor Kristin Sheffield, biostatistician Yimei Han, associate professor Yong-Fang Kuo, Sealy Center on Aging director Dr. James Goodwin and associate professor Dr. Taylor Riall. Support for this research was provided by the NCI; the Office of Research, Development and Information, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services; Information Management Services Inc.; the SEER program; and the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas.
END
Scientists at North Carolina State University have discovered a phenomenon never seen before in plants while studying molecular changes inside tree cells as wood is formed.
In research published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Aug. 20, the team found that one member of a family of proteins called transcription factors took control of a cascade of genes involved in forming wood, which includes a substance called lignin that binds fibers together and gives wood its strength.
The controller protein regulated gene expression on multiple ...
VIDEO:
Princeton University researchers designed a "video game " for predatory fish that demonstrated that collective motion in animal groups might have evolved as a finely tuned defense against attack from predators....
Click here for more information.
A video game designed for predatory fish might have unraveled some lingering evolutionary questions about group formation and movement in animals, according to new research that took a unique approach to observing ...
Cancer stem cells are defined by three abilities: differentiation, self-renewal and their ability to seed a tumor. These stem cells resist chemotherapy and many researchers posit their role in relapse. A University of Colorado Cancer Center study recently published in the journal Stem Cells, shows that melanoma cells with these abilities are marked by the enzyme ALDH, and imagines new therapies to target high-ALDH cells, potentially weeding the body of these most dangerous cancer creators.
"We've seen ALDH as a stem cell marker in other cancer types, but not in melanoma, ...
We use language every day to express our emotions, but can this language actually affect what and how we feel? Two new studies from Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, explore the ways in which the interaction between language and emotion influences our well-being.
Putting Feelings into Words Can Help Us Cope with Scary Situations
Katharina Kircanski and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles investigated whether verbalizing a current emotional experience, even when that experience is negative, might be an ...
HOUSTON – (Aug. 23, 2012) – A nanoparticle developed at Rice University and tested in collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) may bring great benefits to the emergency treatment of brain-injury victims, even those with mild injuries.
Combined polyethylene glycol-hydrophilic carbon clusters (PEG-HCC), already being tested to enhance cancer treatment, are also adept antioxidants. In animal studies, injections of PEG-HCC during initial treatment after an injury helped restore balance to the brain's vascular system.
The results were reported this month in the ...
Analysis of small, repeating earthquakes in an Antarctic ice sheet may not only lead to an understanding of glacial movement, but may also shed light on stick slip earthquakes like those on the San Andreas fault or in Haiti, according to Penn State geoscientists.
"No one has ever seen anything with such regularity," said Lucas K. Zoet, recent Penn State Ph. D. recipient, now a postdoctoral fellow at Iowa State University. "An earthquake every 25 minutes for a year."
The researchers looked at seismic activity recorded during the Transantarctic Mountains Seismic Experiment ...
NOAA researchers are getting a comprehensive view of the ocean floor using a new instrument, and have confirmed that there are high numbers of young sea scallops off of Delaware Bay.
Unofficially dubbed the "Seahorse" because of its curved and spiny profile, the instrument is the latest and most sophisticated version of a survey system developed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and used on sea scallop resource surveys conducted by NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC). This is the first year that the sea scallop survey has used both a dredge ...
Based on ten years of fieldwork in the Tetons of Wyoming, WCS Conservation Biologist, University of Montana Professor and study author Dr. Joel Berger looked at whether body size of juvenile moose and maternal presence were related to survival of the young animals. In animals from elk to lizards and fish, size matters, and larger individuals enjoy a survival advantage. However, results of Berger's study showed that for juvenile moose, body mass had no significant effect on overwinter survival. Maternal presence did.
The study, "Estimation of Body-Size Traits by Photogrammetry ...
By affixing nanoscale gold spheres onto a microscopic bead of glass, researchers have created a super-sensor that can detect even single samples of the smallest known viruses. The sensor uses a peculiar behavior of light known as "whispering gallery mode," named after the famous circular gallery in St. Paul's Cathedral in London, where a whisper near the wall can be heard around the gallery.
In a similar way, waves of light are sent whirling around the inside of a small glass bead, resonating at a specific frequency. Just as a small object on a vibrating violin string ...
Cities – with their concrete canyons, isolated greenery, and congested traffic – create seemingly chaotic and often powerful wind patterns known as urban flows. Carried on these winds are a variety of environmental hazards, including exhaust particles, diesel fumes, chemical residues, ozone, and the simple dust and dander produced by dense populations.
In a paper published in the American Institute of Physics (AIP) journal Physics of Fluids, researchers present the unexpected finding that pollutant particles, rather than scattering randomly, prefer to accumulate in specific ...
