The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is “committed to continuing to advance the science around COVID-19, moving more vaccines into more communities—especially those communities most at risk for COVID-19 infection—and working to improve health equity,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH, said during a March 2021 U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) hearing.
Randi is a 57-year-old patient who identifies as female. She was diagnosed with clear cell metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC), and her past medical history includes mild hypertension managed with amlodipine and a two-year history of transient musculoskeletal pain managed with tramadol. She reports a family history of cardiovascular disease and rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Her primary care physician suspects Randi is at the beginning stages of fibromyalgia but has not made a conclusive diagnosis because she hasn’t experienced additional symptoms.
On July 16, 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved belumosudil (RezurockTM), a kinase inhibitor, for the treatment of chronic graft-versus-host disease (chronic GVHD) in adult and pediatric patients 12 years and older after failure of at least two prior lines of systemic therapy.
In July 2021, the Biden-Harris administration, through the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Labor, and Treasury and the Office of Personnel Management, issued the Requirements Related to Surprise Billing interim final rule to restrict surprise billing. The rule applies to billing for patients in job-based and individual health plans who obtain emergency care, nonemergency care from out-of-network providers at in-network facilities, and air ambulance services from out-of-network providers.
Get to know Valerie Burger, RN, MA, MS, OCN®, CPN, treasurer for the ONS Board of Directors from 2021–2023 and director-at-large from 2021–2024. Burger is an assistant vice president of cancer services from Bellmore, NY.
Hypercalcemia of malignancy (HCM) is a common paraneoplastic syndrome associated with poor prognosis that affects approximately 20%–30% of patients with cancer. It’s most often seen in patients with breast, lung, renal, or ovarian cancers; squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck; multiple myeloma; and certain lymphomas.
Nurses and other healthcare providers at the point of care use evidence-based practice techniques to ask and answer clinically relevant questions to promote quality, safety, and improved patient outcomes. Evidence-based practice is the process of shared decision-making that incorporates the best available evidence, clinical expertise, and patient preferences and values.
More than 40% of patients with melanoma treated with nivolumab or pembrolizumab experience persistent long-term immune-related adverse events (irAEs) for at least 1.5 years, researchers reported in JAMA Oncology.
Research has identified an association between malnutrition and functional deficits in patients with cancer, regardless of age, and other studies confirm that malnutrition affects treatment tolerability, outcomes, and quality of life for patients with cancer. However, studies have also found that oncology clinicians do not consistently assess for malnutrition and functional deficits in clinical settings.
Cardiac toxicities are associated with many types of cancer therapies, with both length of and time since treatment increasing a patient’s risk for the adverse event. Anthracycline chemotherapies are among the oldest agents still used for a variety of cancer diagnoses, and as cancer survivorship continues to grow, more patients are presenting with late-onset cardiac complications.