Perioperative Care of the Breastfeeding Patient.

Nurses providing surgical care in nonobstetrical ambulatory surgery centers or specialty hospitals without traditional lactation resources may need to care for patients who are breastfeeding. Nurses in these settings play an important role in supporting and protecting the breastfeeding relationship for nursing mothers separated from their infants during illness or surgical procedures. It is important for care providers to understand how hospitalization and the medications administered before, during, and after a surgical procedure affect mothers who are breastfeeding their infants.

Implementation and Organization of a Perioperative Lactation Program: A Descriptive Study.

Introduction: As breastfeeding rates rise, perioperative care of lactating women is an increasingly important issue. There is a lack of reports describing the implementation of perioperative lactation programs. Beginning in 2014, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center developed a perioperative lactation program to address the comprehensive care of lactating patients.

Studying cancer in minorities: a look at the numbers.

Background: Inclusion of minorities is an important but challenging aspect of epidemiologic studies in the United States. One aspect of this challenge that has received little attention is the actual number of minorities with specific cancers. The authors aimed to understand how population characteristics affect the numbers of minority cancer cases in Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) regions.

Germline PALB2 mutation analysis in breast-pancreas cancer families.

Background: Germline mutations in the PALB2 gene have been implicated in both breast cancer and pancreatic cancer susceptibility. The extent to which PALB2 mutations account for cancer susceptibility in breast-pancreas cancer families is unknown.

Methods: High Resolution Melting analysis and Multiplex Ligation-dependent Probe Amplification were performed to investigate the prevalence of PALB2 mutations in patients with either a personal history of both breast and pancreatic cancer or a personal history of breast cancer and a family history of a first degree relative with pancreatic cancer.