Dialogues

Jan 25, 2025, 04:54

ASCO24 Updates: Pablo Jiménez-Labaig on Mental Health in Head and Neck Cancer Patients

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting is one of the largest and most prestigious conferences in the field of oncology. This year, the meeting took place from May 31 to June 4 in Chicago, Illinois. The event gathers oncologists, researchers, and healthcare professionals from around the world to discuss the latest advancements in cancer research, treatment, and patient care. Keynote sessions, research presentations, and panel discussions are typically part of the agenda, providing attendees with valuable insights into emerging trends and innovations in oncology.

This year, OncoDaily was at ASCO 2024 for the first time covering the meeting on-site. We had the pleasure of interviewing researchers who summarized the highlights of their work.

In this video, Pablo Jiménez-Labaig, clinical research fellow at the the Royal Marsden Hospital, shared insights on ‘Mapping the mental health correlates of head and neck cancer: A systemic review and meta-analysis.‘

I am Pablo Jiménez, one of the clinical research fellows at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London. I am focused basically on patients with head and neck cancer and I presented at the SASCO Congress the poster mapping the mental health correlates in patients with head and neck cancer, a systematic review and meta-analysis. So this is to the date the widest study about mental health in patients with head and neck cancer, which will be much more of 700,000 patients with their depressive symptoms and anxiety symptoms, insomnia, post-traumatic stress disorders.

We found that the depression rates and the mental health rates issues is quite high in this population. So it’s just raising the concern to address these symptoms when we are in front of this kind of patients. This is a potential cause of a high rate of suicide, about 160 per 100,000 people with these diseases.

And another conclusion of this study is that we as well, we did a super analysis, basically focusing the patient that were treated with radiotherapy and it’s at the end of this treatment, the moment when the patient exposed the highest rates of depressive symptoms. So it’s a potential time point to figure out interventional strategies to tackle with these symptoms and improve the quality of life of these patients.

More videos and content from ASCO 2024 on OncoDaily.