There are over 100 different types of cancer that can attack the human body and the National Cancer Institute estimates 1,685,210 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States this year. Nearly 600,000 Americans die from some type of cancer annually.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is the National Institutes of Health’s most recent “Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer,” published in March of this year, shows cancer death rates are declining, and Scully-Welsh Cancer Center medical oncologist Dr. Stephen Patterson,points to new medications – including a variety of chemotherapy-related drugs – as one of the top reasons for the decline.
“All these new drugs are coming out,” says Patterson enthusiastically, “we get them almost every month it seems.”
He is not exaggerating.
So far this year the FDA has approved no fewer than a dozen new chemotherapy treatment drugs and nearly a quarter of the calendar year is still to come.
But what may be even more important, according to Patterson, is what’s been done to make chemotherapy more palatable to patients.
“That’s not the area of medicine that really gets talked about a lot. It’s not an area that gets published a lot, but I end up spending a lot of time talking to patients about this. It’s called supportive care drugs.
Supportive care drugs help prevent the nausea, vomiting and excessive bowel movements brought on by certain chemo agent, explains Patterson. They include allopurinol, rasburicase and amifostine.
Energized by the topic, Patterson continues saying, “Even though we read how great our new drugs are to treat cancer, the drugs that we have to prevent and reduce side effects are even better.”
Now, according to Patterson, “We’ve probably had two or three different generations of improving drugs to prevent [chemotherapy] side effects. I’ll give you an example: Just a few years ago we commonly would admit patients for some chemotherapies because we knew the drugs were going to cause nausea and vomiting. Now those very same drugs we do in an outpatient infusion center just like you see here and it’s because we now have the drugs that can prevent those side effects.”
That explains, at least in part, why the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center says, depending on the type and stage of a patient’s cancer, their first cancer appointment will likely be with a medical oncologist, the doctors who prescribe chemotherapy drugs.
Patients are sent to medical oncologists for other reasons, as well. “A lot of times people get scheduled with a medical oncologist when there may be some vagueness about which direction their treatment should go because medical oncologists usually are in the center of all of it,” Patterson says. “[Patients] usually get sent to us for that reason and then we decide: Do they need to see surgery or radiation or both.”
The Centers for Disease Control estimates this year about 650,000 cancer patients will receive chemotherapy in outpatient oncology clinics like the one at Scully-Welsh. But it warns those patients are also at risk for developing serious infections – Infections that can lead to hospitalizations, disruptions in chemotherapy schedules and even death.
That’s because many chemotherapy drugs can at least temporarily damage a patient’s bone marrow where infection-fighting white blood cells are made. With a potentially weakened immune system, cancer patients are especially at risk when exposed to transmissible infections from other patients as well as medical staff members.
So, Patterson and his staff need to be hyper-vigilant.
Still, Patterson’s enthusiasm is palpable. “I think it’s a very exciting time to be an oncologist in general,” he exclaims, “The drugs we have are working, and they are working better. I think that we are changing the paradigm of the way we manage patients based on a lot of these newer therapeutics.”
The full text of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries’ “Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer” can be viewed online at http://seer.cancer.gov/report_to_nation/.
Dr. Stephen Patterson is with the Scully-Welsh Cancer Center in Vero Beach at 998 35th Lane. The phone number is 772-266-4810.