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Tag: cancer

Published on
White background with pink scrabble tiles that spell cancer.
Photo by Anna Tarazevich

This is a reposting of an original blog post published in The Rotation Blog on September 27, 2024.

September is a big month for cancer awareness - it’s Blood Cancer Awareness Month, Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, Gynecologic Cancer Awareness Month, Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month, Leukemia, Lymphoma, and Hodgkin’s Lymphoma Awareness Month, Prostate Cancer Awareness Month, and Thyroid Cancer Awareness Month! Rather than trying to highlight each of these different types of cancers, we’ll highlight some of Himmelfarb’s cancer resources in this post.

Himmelfarb Library provides clinical, evidence-based medicine resources, including DynaMed and epocrates+, which provide information to support cancer care. DynaMed is a point-of-care tool designed to facilitate efficient and evidence-based patient care information, including drug and disease information. DynaMed provides information including background, history and physical, diagnosis, disease management, prognosis, prevention, and screening information on medical conditions. DynaMed’s easy-to-read topic pages cover a wide range of conditions and diseases, including cancers such as acute lymphoblastic leukemia/lymphoblastic lymphoma in children, as seen in the screenshot below.  

Screenshot of DynaMed entry for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.

epocrates+ is Himmelfarb’s other evidence-based point-of-care database that provides disease and drug information. epocrates+ provides a step-by-step approach, covering prevention, risk factors, history and exam, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. Like DynaMed, epocrates+ covers a wide range of medical conditions, including cancers. epcorates+ also offers a quick reference area that covers the basics of a condition, as seen in the cervical cancer quick reference screenshot below.

Screenshot of epocrates+ Quick Reference entry for Cervical Cancer.

If you’re looking for the latest in cancer research, Himmelfarb provides access to many cancer journals! The following list is just a sample of the cancer-related titles you can access through Himmelfarb’s journal collection:

  • Cancer: An American Cancer Society journal that started publication in 1948, Cancer is one of the oldest peer-reviewed oncology journals. This journal focuses on highly relevant, timely information on the etiology, course, and treatment of human cancer.
  • JAMA Oncology: This definitive oncology journal publishes important clinical research, major cancer breakthroughs, actionable discoveries, and innovative cancer treatments.
  • Nature Reviews: Clinical Oncology: This journal publishes in-depth reviews on the entire spectrum of clinical oncology.
  • Cancer Cell: This journal provides access to major advances in cancer research, including clinical investigations that establish new paradigms in treatment, diagnosis, or prevention of cancers.
  • Gynecologic Oncology: This journal publishes clinical and investigative articles about tumors of the female reproductive tract and the etiology, diagnosis, and treatment of female cancers.
  • Journal of the National Cancer Institute: This journal publishes significant cancer research findings focused on clinical, epidemiologic, behavioral, and health outcomes studies.
  • Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network: JNCCN publishes the latest information on clinical practices, oncology health services research, and translational medicine, as well as updates to the NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology.

The National Cancer Institute publishes information summaries on specific types of cancer and cancer topics. Summaries are available via a patient version, which provides straightforward information for consumers, as well as health professional versions with more detailed information and supporting citations. For example, the prostate cancer patient overview provides a brief overview, as well as information related to causes and prevention, screening, treatment, research, statistics, and resources for coping with cancer. The prostate cancer health professional version provides much of this same information, with more in-depth links for treatment, screening, genetics, and supportive and palliative care.

If you’re interested in finding health statistics about cancer, we have information on that, too! Check out our Health Statistics: Cancer Guide. This guide provides links to resources to find general cancer statistics, as well as breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. Resources to find cancer mortality maps and graphs are also included.

Published on
Graph showing number of cancer survivors in the US by year and time since diagnosis
Source: NIH Office of Cancer Survivorship

June is National Cancer Survivor Month. According to the NIH Office of Cancer Survivorship, as of May 2025 there are currently 18.6 million cancer survivors in the United States. This means that approximately 5.4% of Americans have survived cancer.

The available statistics on cancer in the United States come from the SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results) Program of the National Cancer Institute. SEER began collecting data on cancer cases in selected areas of the US in 1973, and has steadily expanded to cover numerous additional areas. The reporting areas are called cancer registries, which are information systems created to collect, store and manage data on people with cancer.

SEER's website is a one-stop shop for reports on cancer statistics in the United States, including the Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer (last updated in April 2025). Overall, cancer mortality in the US has been on a decline, and in particular, new cases of and deaths from tobacco-related cancers have decreased; however, rates of cancers associated with excess body weight have been increasing.

For insights on cancer survivorship, however, the NIH Office of Cancer Survivorship is the main source of statistics and graphs and publications related to survivorship.

In May 2025, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network updated their survivorship practice guideline. The guideline is comprised three major areas of focus: General Survivorship Principles, Preventive Health, and Late Effects/Long-Term Psychosocial and Physical Problems. The guideline is comprehensive and frequently updated. Recent updates to the guideline include specific instructions about follow-up visits survivors should have based on their type of treatment, benchmarks for screenings and tests, and changes and additions to websites that are useful for survivors to know about.

The guideline also has a robust definition of survivorship, which recognizes as survivors those living with metastatic disease. The definition concludes with: "As more evidence is established for this population, more specific survivorship guidelines for individuals living with metastatic cancers may be developed." (Sanft et al., 2025) This is an important statement as it highlights both the uncertainty for survivors and changes to how survivorship is measured.

For a cancer survivor like me (cutaneous melanoma diagnosed in 2013, metastases to my lungs in 2014, brain metastases in 2015... but no active disease since 2016), defining survivorship remains difficult. In scanning through the NCCN guidelines, I recognize some of the conditions and potential late effects that my care team monitors for -- I have already dealt with a couple of those. What would be most useful from a patient perspective would be knowing that for malignant melanoma -- a cancer which had few effective treatments until the advent of immunotherapy and targeted therapy in the early 2010s -- survival benchmarks exist based on the newer treatments. But evidence takes time. As a result, the survivorship landscape for melanoma survivors looks very different from that of survivors of cancers that have treatments with much longer track records, such as breast cancers. The newer treatments for melanoma, while no longer experimental, also vary in effectiveness from one patient to another. My own response to treatment has been atypically good, from what my practitioners tell me.

This spring, I marked the milestone of being able to "graduate" to annual scans -- a milestone I achieved not because of nine years of durable cancer-free life, but because I have now surpassed five years since stopping drug treatment. Patients like me do not have the luxury of relying on a well-established set of benchmarks for our survival. Rather, in this era of novel cancer treatments and increasing survival, we must accept the fact that every morning we wake up cancer-free, we add to the available data. While it would be preferable to live with more certainty, I am grateful to be able to contribute to a greater understanding of cancer in this way. The recent update to the NCCN's practice guideline for survivorship helps remind me that I can and should still work towards living an even healthier life as I navigate a new type of survivorship.

References

Sanft, T., Day, A. T., Ansbaugh, S. M., Ariza-Heredia, E. J., Armenian, S., Baker, K. S., Ballinger, T. J., Cathcart-Rake, E. J., Cohen, S. H., Evgeniou, E., Fairman, N. P., Feliciano, J., Flores, T. F., Friedman, D. L., Gabel, N. M., Goldman, M. E., Hill-Kayser, C. E., Hock, K., Kline-Quiroz, C., … Freedman-Cass, D. (2025). NCCN Guidelines® Insights: Survivorship, Version 2.2025. Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, 23(6), 208-. https://doi.org/10.6004/jnccn.2025.0028

Published on
White background with pink scrabble tiles that spell cancer.
Photo by Anna Tarazevich

September is a big month for cancer awareness - it’s Blood Cancer Awareness Month, Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, Gynecologic Cancer Awareness Month, Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month, Leukemia, Lymphoma, and Hodgkin’s Lymphoma Awareness Month, Prostate Cancer Awareness Month, and Thyroid Cancer Awareness Month! Rather than trying to highlight each of these different types of cancers, we’ll highlight some of Himmelfarb’s cancer resources in this post.

Himmelfarb Library provides clinical, evidence-based medicine resources including DynaMed and epocrates+ which provide information to support cancer care. DynaMed is a point-of-care tool designed to facilitate efficient and evidence-based patient care information including drug and disease information. DynaMed provides information including background, history and physical, diagnosis, disease management, prognosis, prevention, and screening information on medical conditions. DynaMed’s easy-to-read topic pages cover a wide range of conditions and diseases, including cancers such as acute lymphoblastic leukemia/lymphoblastic lymphoma in children as seen in the screenshot below.  

Screenshot of DynaMed entry for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.

epocrates+ is Himmelfarb’s other evidence-based point-of-care database that provides disease and drug information. epocrates+ provides a step-by-step approach, covering prevention, risk factors, history and exam, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. Like DynaMed, epocrates+ covers coverage of a wide range of medical conditions, including cancers. Epcorates also offers a quick reference area that covers the basics of a condition, as seen in the cervical cancer quick reference screenshot below.

Screenshot of epocrates+ Quick Reference entry for Cervical Cancer.

If you’re looking for the latest in cancer research, Himmelfarb provides access to many cancer journals! The following list is just a sample of the cancer-related titles you can access through Himmelfarb’s journal collection:

  • Cancer: An American Cancer Society journal that started publication in 1948, Cancer is one of the oldest peer-reviewed oncology journals. This journal focuses on highly relevant, timely information on the etiology, course, and treatment of human cancer.
  • JAMA Oncology: This definitive oncology journal publishes important clinical research, major cancer breakthroughs, actionable discoveries, and innovative cancer treatments.
  • Nature Reviews: Clinical Oncology: This journal publishes in-depth reviews on the entire spectrum of clinical oncology.
  • Cancer Cell: This journal provides access to major advances in cancer research including clinical investigations that establish new paradigms in treatment, diagnosis, or prevention of cancers.
  • Gynecologic Oncology: This journal publishes clinical and investigative articles about tumors of the female reproductive tract and the etiology, diagnosis, and treatment of female cancers.
  • Journal of the National Cancer Institute: This journal publishes significant cancer research findings focused on clinical, epidemiologic, behavioral, and health outcomes studies.
  • Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network: JNCCN publishes the latest information on clinical practices, oncology health services research, and translational medicine, as well as updates to the NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology.

If you’re interested in finding health statistics about cancer, we have information on that too! Check out our Health Statistics: Cancer Guide. This guide provides links to resources to find general cancer statistics, as well as breast cancer, prostate cancer, and colon cancer. Resources to find cancer mortality maps and graphs are also included.

Published on
one person's hand holding another person's hand

June is Cancer Survivors Month. Any cancer diagnosis induces feelings of anxiety, uncertainty and fear in patients. While novel approaches to and treatments for cancer are improving survival rates, social determinants of health continue to exert significant impact on patients’ ability to experience positive outcomes to treatment. Let’s look at one of these determinants, economic stability, in the context of cancer survival.

The term “cancer-related financial toxicity” was introduced in 2013 by Zafar and Abernethy, and described as, “the patient-level impact of the cost of cancer care” (Zafar and Abernethy, 2013). Even those patients who are privately insured are not protected from financial toxicity, as a 2022 study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found. Out-of-pocket expenditures by privately-insured cancer patients in the United States have increased, due to the rise in high-deductible insurance plans and greater expected patient contribution to medical expenses (Shih et al, 2022).

How best, then, to help patients navigate the potential financial burdens of a cancer diagnosis, and thereby improve their potential treatment outcomes? A 2023 scoping review in Critical Reviews in Oncology/Hematology examined interventions for financial toxicity among cancer survivors. The interventions discussed include: financial navigation, which includes identifying patients at high risk for financial toxicity, offering guidance on out-of-pocket costs, and facilitating access to programs to alleviate financial stress. Financial counseling helps patients access advice and guidance on managing financial toxicity caused by cancer treatment. Insurance education entails providing patients a structured way to develop insurance literacy and assistance in choosing a plan. Other types of interventions examined included multidisciplinary psychosocial supports, intensive symptom assessments, and supportive care (Yuan et al, 2023).

The effectiveness of the interventions, researchers found, were closely tied to the causes of the cancer-related financial toxicity, with socioeconomic and employment status, cancer stage, and type of treatment, type of insurance, as well as coping skills all having a direct impact on how effective financial interventions could be. Looking closely at just one of the interventions mentioned above, engaging with financial navigation helped cancer patients save significant dollar amounts annually by facilitating the procurement of free medication, and insurance premium and co-pay assistance.

The financial interventions described in the evidence reviewed differed greatly, but more generally, the recent focus in the literature on finding ways to alleviate financial toxicity frequently faced by cancer patients is one promising step towards improving outcomes for all patients dealing with cancer.

References

Debela, D. T., Muzazu, S. G., Heraro, K. D., Ndalama, M. T., Mesele, B. W., Haile, D. C., Kitui, S. K., & Manyazewal, T. (2021). New approaches and procedures for cancer treatment: Current perspectives. SAGE open medicine, 9, 20503121211034366. https://doi.org/10.1177/20503121211034366

Lau, L. M. S., Khuong-Quang, D. A., Mayoh, C., Wong, M., Barahona, P., Ajuyah, P., Senapati, A., Nagabushan, S., Sherstyuk, A., Altekoester, A. K., Fuentes-Bolanos, N. A., Yeung, V., Sullivan, A., Omer, N., Diamond, Y., Jessop, S., Battaglia, L., Zhukova, N., Cui, L., Lin, A., … Ziegler, D. S. (2024). Precision-guided treatment in high-risk pediatric cancers. Nature medicine, 10.1038/s41591-024-03044-0. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03044-0

Shih, Y. T., Xu, Y., Bradley, C., Giordano, S. H., Yao, J., & Yabroff, K. R. (2022). Costs Around the First Year of Diagnosis for 4 Common Cancers Among the Privately Insured. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 114(10), 1392–1399. https://doi.org/10.1093/jnci/djac141

Yuan, X., Zhang, X., He, J., & Xing, W. (2023). Interventions for financial toxicity among cancer survivors: A scoping review. Critical reviews in oncology/hematology, 192, 104140. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.critrevonc.2023.104140

Zafar SY, Abernethy AP. Financial toxicity, Part I: a new name for a growing problem. Oncology (Williston Park, NY). 2013;27(2):80-149.

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