When Bad News Comes Through the Portal: Strengthening Trust and Guiding Patients When They Receive Bad Results Before Their Clinicians.

Communication in oncology was challenging long before the emergence of the US 21st Century Cures Act. Before 2021, a growing body of evidence had demonstrated the benefits of patients' access to and review of the clinical notes in their charts (open notes); however, studies examining the benefits of immediate access to test results were scarce until the implementation of the Cures Act's Information Blocking Rule. Individuals grappling with cancer today now possess immediate access to their laboratory results, imaging scans, diagnostic tests, and progress notes as mandated by law.

Development, Feasibility, and Acceptability of an Oncologist Group Peer Support Program From ASCO's Clinician Well-Being Task Force.

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has had deleterious effects on oncologist professional and personal well-being, the optimal delivery of quality cancer care, and the future cancer care workforce, with many departing the field. Hence, the identification of evidence-based approaches to sustain oncologists is essential to promote well-being.

Materials And Methods: We developed a brief, oncologist-centered, virtual group peer support program and tested its feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary impact on well-being.

Cancer Pain and Opioid Use Disorder.

Opioid use disorder (OUD) is increasingly recognized and co-present in patients with cancer. Unfortunately, OUD is not addressed or treated adequately in oncology settings. In addition, patients with cancer-related pain treated with narcotic pain medications are at risk for nonmedical opioid use (NMOU).

Clinical Implications of Cancer Related Inflammation and Depression: A Critical Review.

Neuropsychiatric symptoms are problematic in cancer settings. In addition to poor quality of life, depression is associated with worsened survival. Patients who develop depression that responds to treatment have the same cancer-related survival as those patients who never had depression.

Cancer-related inflammation and depressive symptoms: Systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: Depressive symptoms in patients with cancer are associated with poor quality of life and decreased survival. Although inflammation is reliably associated with depression in otherwise healthy individuals, the association in patients with cancer remains unclear. Given the high prevalence of cancer-related inflammation, the authors aimed to establish the relationship between inflammation and depression in cancer patients based on extant literature.

Therapeutic Strategies to Tackle Burnout and Emotional Exhaustion in Frontline Medical Staff: Narrative Review.

Burnout and emotional exhaustion in frontline healthcare workers and their implications for the health of patients, individual clinicians, and organizations are increasingly described among various healthcare settings. Yet therapeutic strategies to address burnout and other work-related conditions are outpaced by innumerable descriptions of burnout prevalence across healthcare disciplines. This review provides a framework that should be helpful in beginning the process of addressing burnout and its related conditions.

Decisional capacity determination and serious mental illness in oncology: Implications for equitable and beneficent care.

Background: Patients with Serious Mental Illness (SMI) have worse survival compared to cancer patients without SMI after controlling for delayed diagnosis. Decision-making capacity (DMC) may be impaired in both populations (cancer or SMI). DMC may be further impaired based on coupled vulnerability factors that challenge Shared Decision Making (SDM) for patients with cancer and SMI.

Interventions to Improve Prognostic Understanding in Advanced Stages of Life-Limiting Illness: A Systematic Review.

Context: Among patients with advanced life-limiting illness, an inaccurate understanding of prognosis is common and associated with negative outcomes. Recent years have seen an emergence of new interventions tested for their potential to improve prognostic understanding. However, this literature has yet to be synthesized.

Potential use of albumin and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio to guide the evaluation and treatment of cancer-related depression and anxiety.

Background: Depression and anxiety are common and associated with inflammation in patients with cancer. Inflammatory indices such as albumin and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) obtained from metabolic panels and complete blood counts should be available for mental health professionals treating anxiety and depression at cancer centers. We hypothesized that albumin and NLR extrapolated from non-mental health oncology appointments would be associated with anxiety and depression and drawn close enough to psychiatry visits to be useful for the psycho-oncologist.

Occupational and Personal Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic on US Oncologist Burnout and Well-Being: A Study From the ASCO Clinician Well-Being Task Force.

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global crisis profoundly affecting oncology care delivery.

Purpose: This study will describe the occupational and personal consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on oncologist well-being and patient care.

Materials And Methods: Four virtual focus groups were conducted with US ASCO member oncologists (September-November 2020).

Oncology Care Provider Training in Empathic Communication Skills to Reduce Lung Cancer Stigma.

Background: Despite the clinical importance of assessing smoking history and advising patients who smoke to quit, patients with lung cancer often experience feelings of blame and stigma during clinical encounters with their oncology care providers (OCPs). Promoting empathic communication during these encounters may help reduce patients' experience of stigma and improve related clinical outcomes. This paper presents the evaluation of OCP- and patient-reported data on the usefulness of an OCP-targeted empathic communication skills (ECS) training to reduce the stigma of lung cancer and improve communication.

Prognostic implications of depression and inflammation in patients with metastatic lung cancer.

Lung cancer-related inflammation is associated with depression. Both elevated inflammation and depression are associated with worse survival. However, outcomes of patients with concomitant depression and elevated inflammation are not known.

The Sickness Behavior Inventory-Revised: Sickness behavior and its associations with depression and inflammation in patients with metastatic lung cancer.

Background: Inflammation may contribute to the high prevalence of depressive symptoms seen in lung cancer. "Sickness behavior" is a cluster of symptoms induced by inflammation that are similar but distinct from depressive symptoms. The Sickness Behavior Inventory-Revised (SBI-R) was developed to measure sickness behavior.

A Longitudinal Analysis of Inflammation and Depression in Patients With Metastatic Lung Cancer: Associations With Survival.

Background: Depression and inflammation are concomitantly elevated in patients with lung cancer and may have collective survival implications. However, the longitudinal relationship between depression and inflammation in patients with metastatic lung cancer is not fully appreciated. We hypothesized that longitudinal changes in inflammation and depression would be concordant; that longitudinally elevated inflammation would lead to greater depression over time; and that depression with inflammation would be more persistent than depression without inflammation.

Prognosis in metastatic lung cancer: vitamin D deficiency and depression-a cross-sectional analysis.

Background: Depression and vitamin D deficiency are common in patients with lung cancer and have prognostic implications in cancer settings. However, their relationship and concomitant survival implications have not been evaluated in patients with metastatic lung cancer specifically. We hypothesised that vitamin D deficiency would be associated with depression and inferior cancer-related survival in patients receiving therapies for stage IV lung cancer.

Early childhood adversity in adult patients with metastatic lung cancer: Cross-sectional analysis of symptom burden and inflammation.

Objective: Psychological and physical symptoms commonly occur in patients with metastatic lung cancer and are associated with reduced quality of life and decreased survival. Previous work has associated these symptoms with inflammation. The experience of Early Childhood Adversity (ECA) is linked to chronic inflammation and may identify adult cancer patients who are at-risk for psychological and physical symptoms.

Decisional Capacity Determination In Patients With Cancer.

Patients with cancer face many difficult decisions and encounter many clinical situations that undermine decisional capacity. For this reason, assessing decision-making capacity should be thought of at every medical encounter. The culmination of variable disease trajectories, following patients to the end of life, use of high-risk treatments, and other weighty personal decisions require attention to patients' ability to engage in decisions.