Sanson-Fisher R et al. Support Care Cancer 2019; 27: 763. doi:10.1007/s00520-018-4568-4

The Restoring Body Image After Cancer psychosocial intervention is effective for addressing body image-related concerns and quality of life in women who have received treatment for breast cancer, a Canadian trial indicates.

The prospective study included 295 women (median age 69 years) with stage I–III breast cancer who were considered clinically robust according to the Deficit Accumulation Index (DAI), which evaluates health status according to deficits in physical and instrumental activities of daily living, psychosocial status, nutrition, frequency of falls, number of medications, comorbidities, social support, and laboratory data.

For example, women who had BCT recorded average BREAST-Q scores of 65.5 points for breast satisfaction, 75.9 points for psychosocial wellbeing, and 57.4 points for sexual wellbeing.

Joly and colleagues therefore conclude: “We recommend rapidly implementing psychosocial support for treated patients with cancer to promote emotional resilience and to avoid the onset of PTSD symptoms.

And they suggest “that oncology clinicians should consider referral for psychosocial care or physical rehabilitation for patients at risk for early discontinuation of ET.”

They highlight interventions that have been shown to improve adherence, such as transportation programs and mobile mammography to overcome transportation barriers, telephone coaching to address psychosocial and logistic factors, and “[u]sing peer educators to deliver health messages and identify barriers to attendance.”

The Committee also reviewed the research and has advised on the management of CRF through exercise, psychosocial interventions, mind–body interventions, yoga, acupuncture, and the use of pharmacologic agents including psychostimulants, antidepressants, acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, and corticosteroids, as well as nutraceutical treatments. medwireNews is an independent medical news service provided by Springer Healthcare. © 2020 Springer Healthcare part of the Springer Nature group Ann Oncol 2020; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annonc.2020.02.016

Fidler: Work from the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention [2] has suggested that there are distinct issues affecting clinical trial enrollment among adolescents with cancer, which will continue to exist even if adolescent–adult joint trials are launched; two of the most important issues are that (i) many adolescents with cancer are not referred to institutions where clinical trials are offered, and (ii) psychosocial barriers impede adolescents with cancer from enrolling in clinical trials.

In this report from the 2017 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology we focus on three studies that evaluated interventions to help patients and their families manage the psychological toll of cancer through the disease continuum.

Angela Bradbury (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA) and co-investigators explain that “[g]iven the complexity of genetic information, potential for false reassurance and psychosocial distress, genetic counseling has traditionally been delivered in person.”