Conference Correspondent

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the US Surgeon General’s report on the dangers of tobacco, the AACR published a policy statement on tobacco use by cancer patients to coincide with its 2014 annual meeting.

Despite the well-known benefits of physical activity for general health and for cancer survivors, only about 1 in 10 of all cancer survivors are doing enough exercise to gain benefits, according to a study reported by Yale investigators.

Increased consumption of coffee was associated with reduced risk of developing hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common type of liver cancer.

Yet another study points out the dangers of obesity, in this case the relationship of prediagnosis obesity to poor outcomes for people with colorectal cancer.

The first prospective study to link reproduction to ovarian cancer risk found that a history of irregular menstrual cycles at age 26 predicted the eventual development of aggressive ovarian cancer.

The American Society of Hematology (ASH) and the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) held back-to-back meetings in December 2013. The ASH annual meeting hosted approximately 20,000 attendees in New Orleans, Louisiana, where more than 5300 abstracts were presented, orally or as posters. About 7500 participants from more than 90 countries attended the breast cancer symposium. Below are selected brief highlights from these meetings.

With the growing number of cancer survivors in the United States and around the world, supportive care has become of even greater importance for these patients.

While branded and generic enoxaparin share many traditional characteristics of low-molecular-weight heparins (LMWHs), they differ in several parameters that are relevant to an antithrombotic effect, according to researchers from Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, Illinois, who presented their findings at the 54th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology.

Panelists at the 2013 Annual Conference of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) view the oncology world as rapidly changing, and the impact of this—for better or for worse—will be felt by healthcare providers, payers, and patients alike.

The annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) focuses on preliminary studies with promising findings for the treatment of cancer. This year’s conference was held in Washington, DC, from April 6-10, 2013