Blog

I’m excited about the opportunities for improving longitudinal cancer care in 2024 – Samantha Siegel

Photo of Samantha Siegel taken from mydoctor.kaiserpermanente.org

Jan 12, 2024, 16:47

I’m excited about the opportunities for improving longitudinal cancer care in 2024 – Samantha Siegel

Samantha Siegel, Physician at The Permanente Medical Group, Inc., recently shared a post by Erin Cummings, Founder and Executive Director of Hodgkin’s International on LinkedIn, adding:

“Opportunities for improvement: CV risk in curable cancer.

We can do more to increase awareness of CV risk for cancer treatments.

Many primary providers do not know that common drugs, given for common cancers are cardiotoxic.

An example, 5FU or 5-fluorouracil, given for colorectal cancer is the second most cardiotoxic class after anthracyclines. There are huge gaps in knowledge surrounding these issues. The result is that certain high-risk patients are not getting baseline echocardiograms or other tests until they have full-blown heart disease. We don’t start discussions about prevention from the time of diagnosis because we could “overwhelm the patients.” I hear this all of the time. We let elevated blood pressures slide because “they have cancer, why should we bug them about a little hypertension?”

As a medical system, we need to:
1) teach this in medical training
2) include it on required updates (medical board recertifications and not just oncology or cardiology but primary care, since most CV risk reduction occurs in primary care)
3) build it into epic and other EMRs to give alerts, etc.

We can do so much more!

I’m excited about the opportunities for improving longitudinal cancer care in 2024. I’m grateful to KP and Stanford for saving my life, so I can focus my life’s work on all of this now.”

Quoting Erin Cummings, Founder and Executive Director of Hodgkin’s International, Inc., post:

“Sadly, this is true. I can’t tell you how many of my fellow Hodgkin’s survivors have died of heart disease as a result of their previous cancer treatment (radiation and/or chemotherapy). And they were young. Most never reached the age of 65. Our mission (at Hodgkin’s International, Inc.) is to make sure that survivors know their risks and that they get the care they need and deserve. Please share this information if you can. You could be saving someone’s life.”

Read further

Source: Samantha Siegel/LinkedIn and Erin Cummings/LinkedIn