Knowledge, practice and communication barriers for oncology doctors in Chile when addressing the sexuality of their patients.

Introduction: Communication in a doctor-patient relationship constitutes a crucial aspect in medicine, and its multiple dimensions encompass a wide variety of ethical issues. Communication is particularly relevant in oncology, because it requires continually dealing with sensitive topics in one of the most highly vulnerable situations as a human: illness and proximity to death. Sexuality is one of these topics because it constitutes an area that is frequently affected by cancer and cancer treatment, which may include causing significant distress, the reinforcement of a negative self-image, relationship conflicts and a permanent memory of having cancer.

Dosimetric characterization and optimization of a customized Stanford total skin electron irradiation (TSEI) technique.

Total skin electron irradiation (TSEI) has been used as a treatment for mycosis fungoides. Our center has implemented a modified Stanford technique with six pairs of 6 MeV adjacent electron beams, incident perpendicularly on the patient who remains lying on a translational platform, at 200 cm from the source. The purpose of this study is to perform a dosimetric characterization of this technique and to investigate its optimization in terms of energy characteristics, extension, and uniformity of the treatment field.

Predictive models for pulmonary function changes after radiotherapy for breast cancer and lymphoma.

Purpose: To propose multivariate predictive models for changes in pulmonary function tests (ΔPFTs) with respect to preradiotherapy (pre-RT) values in patients undergoing RT for breast cancer and lymphoma.

Methods And Materials: A prospective study was designed to measure ΔPFTs of patients undergoing RT. Sixty-six patients were included.