Changes in the Care Setting of First Consults to Palliative and Supportive Care Over a Seven-Year Period.

Context: Optimal benefits from palliative care (PC) are achieved when first consults (PC1) occur early, in the outpatient setting. Late PC1, like those in the intensive care unit (ICU), limit these benefits.

Objectives: The objective of this study was to determine the proportion of PC1 over time in the outpatient, ICU, and inpatient non-ICU settings.

Anti-cytokines in the treatment of cancer cachexia.

Cancer-related cachexia (CRC) is a multidimensional, frequent and devastating syndrome. It is mainly characterized by a loss of skeletal muscle tissue, accompanied or not by a loss of adipose tissue that leads to impaired functionality, poor quality of life, less tolerability to cancer-directed therapies, high levels of psychosocial distress, and shorter survival. Despite its clinical importance, there is a lack of effective pharmacological therapies to manage CRC.

Continuous palliative sedation for patients with advanced cancer at a tertiary care cancer center.

Background: Palliative sedation (PS) is an intervention to treat refractory symptoms and to relieve suffering at the end of life. Its prevalence and practice patterns vary widely worldwide. The aim of our study was to evaluate the frequency, clinical indications and outcomes of PS in advanced cancer patients admitted to our tertiary comprehensive cancer center.

Assessment of adherence to the guidelines for the management of nausea and vomiting induced by chemotherapy.

Objective: To assess adherence of the prescribing physicians in a private cancer care center to the American Society of Clinical Oncology guideline for antiemetic prophylaxis, in the first cycle of antineoplastic chemotherapy.

Methods: A total of 139 chemotherapy regimens, of 105 patients, were evaluated retrospectively from 2011 to 2013.

Results: We observed 78% of non-adherence to the guideline rate.

Is there publication bias towards Brazilian articles on cancer?

Objective: To investigate whether Brazilian articles on cancer are published in journals with an impact factor and/or repercussion (measured by the number of citations) inferior to those that come from foreign organizations.

Methods: A search was carried out in PubMed for the MeSH term "neoplasm" with the limits clinical trial, affiliation of the Brazilian author(s), and interval from July 1st, 2009 to June 30, 2010. Selected for matching were non-Brazilian related articles published from three months prior to three months after the date of publication of the Brazilian study.