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Cancer
ROCHESTER, Minn. — Three new articles from The Lancet Hematology published today examine how clinicians and researchers can better identify, track and measure the effects of blood cancer treatments on patients during treatment and over the long term.
Gita Thanarajasingam, M.D., a Mayo Clinic hematologist and oncologist, leads The Lancet Haematology’s Adverse Events Reporting Series. The Series focuses on how clinicians care for people after treatment, how they measure treatment side effects and whether digital tools can help detect and manage those effects in real-world practice.
“Blood cancer treatments continue to become more effective and patients are living longer,” says Dr. Thanarajasingam. “Just as we continue to evolve our treatments and detection in cancer, however, we need to evolve how we measure the effects on patients and their lives.”
First launched in 2018, the Commission explores how newer treatments can be evaluated and whether new questions and tools can improve assessment. Current models for measuring treatment side effects may not adequately or consistently capture the duration and impact of symptoms on patients’ lives. For example, a grading system might rank six months of mild nausea lower than four days of severe nausea without fully accounting for how a persistent symptom affects a patient’s daily life.
The articles also examine the need for longer-term assessment. Many treatment studies measure outcomes only through five years after treatment, potentially leaving gaps in identifying and addressing health problems that emerge later. The reports suggest that cancer care should extend beyond treatment and that new approaches could help support patients’ health and quality of life during and after treatment.
The articles also describe how technology could support changes in how treatment effects are measured. Digital tools such as symptom-reporting apps, wearable devices and artificial intelligence could shift cancer safety monitoring from periodic assessments of what has already happened toward more continuous monitoring.
“Technology can enable new standards in care simply because it could offer more and real-time data,” says Dr. Thanarajasingam. The report cautions, however, that new technologies are only a valuable catalyst if they are accurate, useful, equitable and built around patients.
“Complete cancer care is driven by the patient and their needs. For every therapeutic advance we make, we must also evolve our assessment standards and take advantage of new information to keep people’s full and ideally, long lives at the core of our decision-making,” says Dr. Thanarajasingam. “Just as we are now able to better personalize treatments, so, too, should we begin to address the whole person and their long-term needs.”
For a complete list of commission members, disclosures and funding, review the articles in The Lancet Haematology.
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