Renaming Palliative Cancer Therapies: Call It What It Is.

This commentary explores the language choices that oncology providers make when discussing cancer therapy goals.

Nomenclature in Palliative Surgery.

Surgical palliative care, palliative care interventions, and palliative surgery all reference a blend of these 2 sub-specialty fields. Despite prior published definitions, use of these phrases both clinically and in the literature is varied and can lead to confusion and misunderstanding. Herein, we proposed the adoption of standardized nomenclature to guide the consistent use of these phrases.

Palliative care interventions for surgical patients: a narrative review.

Background And Objective: Palliative interventions have known benefits in the care of surgical patients with advanced illness. However, the literature supporting the routine use and implementation of palliative care in the context of surgery is limited. The primary aim of this review was to explore the literature that has been published in the field of surgical palliative care since 2016.

The Empathy Project: A Skills-Development Game: Innovations in Empathy Development.

Context: Empathy is increasingly described as a learnable skill and is included in professionalism requirements for health care providers, yet there are few effective tools for developing and practicing empathy skills.

Innovation: An educational innovation intended to isolate and develop skills to respond to patients' emotions. The game-based tool was developed on the job during the authors' Hospice and Palliative Medicine fellowship year and was played with learners in various disciplines.

Discussing Prognosis and Shared Decision-Making.

When making high-stakes decisions with their patients, surgeons may have only one opportunity to get a life-changing conversation right. These loaded conversations cover immense ground. Bad news, emotion, prognosis, treatment choices, and patient goals all play a part in coming up with the right plan for each individual patient.

Surgery Hurts: Characterizing the Experience of Pain in Surgical Patients as Witnessed by Medical Students.

Background: The patient experience around surgical care is poorly characterized. Medical students have a unique position on the surgical team, which allows them to observe patient experiences that may otherwise be overlooked. The objective of this study was to characterize surgical patients' experience with pain as witnessed by medical students.

Third-Year Medical Students' Reactions to Surgical Patients in Pain: Doubt, Distress, and Depersonalization.

Context: Medical students have limited instruction about how to manage the interpersonal relationships required to care for patients in pain.

Objectives: The objective of this study was to characterize the experiences of medical students as they encounter pain, suffering, and the emotional experiences of doctoring.

Methods: We used qualitative analysis to explore the content of 341 essays written by third-year medical students who described their experiences with surgical patients in pain.

Molecular definition of a metastatic lung cancer state reveals a targetable CD109-Janus kinase-Stat axis.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, with the majority of mortality resulting from metastatic spread. However, the molecular mechanism by which cancer cells acquire the ability to disseminate from primary tumors, seed distant organs, and grow into tissue-destructive metastases remains incompletely understood. We combined tumor barcoding in a mouse model of human lung adenocarcinoma with unbiased genomic approaches to identify a transcriptional program that confers metastatic ability and predicts patient survival.

Neuroendocrine tumors of the pancreas: Degree of cystic component predicts prognosis.

Background: Although most pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors are solid, approximately 10% are cystic. Some studies have suggested that cystic pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors are associated with a more favorable prognosis.

Methods: A retrospective review of all patients with pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors who underwent operative resection between 1999 and 2014 at a single academic medical center was performed.

Supporting Medical Students' Pursuit of Longitudinal Patient Experiences: Piloting an Innovative Visit Notification Tool at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Problem: Both medical educators and students have an increasing interest in longitudinal patient experiences (LPE) that allow students to work with patients at multiple points in time, often across multiple clinical settings. Despite this interest in LPE, following patients over time and across health systems remains a challenge.

Approach: In August 2012-May 2013, with faculty support, two third-year medical students implemented a pilot program at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in the third-year block clerkship curriculum.

Discovery of asymptomatic moyamoya arteriopathy in pediatric syndromic populations: radiographic and clinical progression.

Object: Limited data exist to guide management of incidentally discovered pediatric moyamoya. Best exemplified in the setting of unilateral moyamoya, in which the unaffected side is monitored, this phenomenon also occurs in populations undergoing routine surveillance of the cerebral vasculature for other conditions, such as sickle cell disease (SCD) or neurofibromatosis Type 1 (NF1). The authors present their experience with specific syndromic moyamoya populations to better characterize the natural history of radiographic and clinical progression in patients with asymptomatic moyamoya.

Essential PcsB putative peptidoglycan hydrolase interacts with the essential FtsXSpn cell division protein in Streptococcus pneumoniae D39.

The connection between peptidoglycan remodeling and cell division is poorly understood in ellipsoid-shaped ovococcus bacteria, such as the human respiratory pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae. In S. pneumoniae, peptidoglycan homeostasis and stress are regulated by the WalRK (VicRK) two-component regulatory system, which positively regulates expression of the essential PcsB cysteine- and histidine-dependent aminohydrolases/peptidases (CHAP)-domain protein.