“First, do no harm” is a fundamental element of health care and considered indistinguishable from the delivery of quality in health care. While cancer care has become more effective, it has also become more complex consequently increasing the risk for harm. We have assessed the extent and severity of treatment related adverse events in hospitalised cancer patients and elucidated how adverse events ...

<p><i>Background</i>: Patients with cancer are often treated by many healthcare providers, receive complex and potentially toxic treatments that can increase the risk for iatrogenic harm. The aim of this study is to investigate whether hospitalised cancer patients are at higher risk of adverse events (AEs) compared to a general hospital population.</p> <p><i>Material and methods</i>: A total of ...

Introduction: To calculate the number of days patients with terminal nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC) spent at home in the last 3 months of life, and to identify factors that predict a lower proportion of days at home.<p> <p>Material and methods: Retrospective study of 434 deceased patients with NSCLC. The number of days spent in a hospital or nursing home was identified from electronic ...

Aim/Background - The aim of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and efficacy, in terms of overall survival, of intensified upfront systemic therapy in patients with metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer who lived in rural Nordland County, Norway.<p> <p>Patients and methods - Overall 117 patients were included in this retrospective study. Three cohorts were created: early docetaxel ...

Background/Aim: The aim of this study was to analyze the toxicity of locoregional adjuvant breast cancer radiotherapy after implementation of this service in a rural healthcare region with long travel distance. Patients and Methods: This was a retrospective single-institution analysis of 87 consecutive female patients (the initial cohort), managed with conventionally fractionated 3-D conformal ...

We present the first calculations of the heavy flavor diffusion coefficient using lattice QCD with light dynamical quarks corresponding to a pion mass of around 320 MeV. For temperatures 195 MeV <T< 352 MeV, the heavy quark spatial diffusion coefficient is found to be significantly smaller than previous quenched lattice QCD and recent phenomenological estimates. The result implies very fast ...

The winter darkness or polar night induces endocrine and metabolic mechanisms, which might reduce the efficacy of cancer treatment and thus contribute to shorter survival. Moreover, season-and weather-related treatment delays and irregularities might also cause reduced efficacy of anti-cancer drugs. Therefore, this study evaluated the prognostic impact of timing of chemotherapy (start during winter ...

Objectives: To provide a widely applicable, blood-biomarker-based and performance-status-based prognostic model, which predicts the survival of patients undergoing palliative non-brain radiotherapy. This model has already been examined in a cohort of patients treated for brain metastases and performed well.<p> <p>Methods: This was a retrospective single-institution analysis of 375 patients, ...

Background Recently, the palliative appropriateness criteria (PAC) score, a novel metric to aid clinical decision-making between different palliative radiotherapy fractionation regimens, has been developed. It includes baseline parameters including but not limited to performance status. The researchers behind the PAC score analyzed the percent of remaining life (PRL) on treatment. The latter was ...

Background/Aim: The study aimed to evaluate practice changes in the time period of the early wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Patients and Methods: This was a retrospective single institution study. We defined palliative radiotherapy (PRT) initiated before Saturday, March 14th as pre-COVID and PRT initiated later as during-COVID (through June 30th). Results: National COVID-19 recommendations ...