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My love for coffee
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The one thing burning in my heart right now is my love of coffee (I should say my love of caffeine) in months like this one. I thought about writing you a poem:
Coffee coffee
I love thee
Coffee coffee
Liquid personality
But I am certainly no poet. So, instead I thought we could discuss an interesting tidbit I came across. In the ASCO Daily news, it mentioned that 85% of patients had not been told about clinical trial options in their meeting with oncologists. In a similar vein, a colleague of mine (Dr. Tim Wassenaar) in conjunction with one of our epidemiologists, Amy Tretham-Dietz, found that the largest barrier to clinical trial enrollment for Wisconsin patients with cancer was not being told about the trial options. In fact, 60% of patients interviewed reported not being told about any trial options! http://www.cancer.wisc.edu/uwccc/events_grandrounds2007.asp (They don't have his lecture live streamed, but I will investigate if we can get that up and will link to it later if I am successful.)
That abstract is being presented at ASCO this year as well. It is up for poster discussion on the afternoon of Friday, May 30 if you are interested. I think part of this may be the overwhelming amount of information that is relayed at an initial consult ... some of it probably is that the oncologist is either truly not telling the patient or already knows that the patient is ineligible for the study. We know from prior work that oncologists who do not tell patients about clinical trials are concerned about undue toxicity for many patients, particularly among older adults.
In a loosely related note, my abstract is also up for poster discussion in the same session (did I already mention it was Friday afternoon?). Yahooie!