Our study supports the hypotheses that the impact of cancer on quality of life over a period of time is not necessarily devastating in survivors. As regards the impact of different medical strategies, although our data are consistent with other research supporting the hypotheses that hormone therapy does not cause a decrease in long-term quality of life, differences we observed between hormone and chemotherapy might be caused by the action of confounds we were not able to control for or by the distortion introduced by the design of the present study.

We developed and pilot tested a 12-item questionnaire, to approach the issue of patients' perception on efficacy of oral chemotherapy. An additional question was on 'trade-off' between treatment efficacy and the ease of oral administration. The motivating underlying hypothesis was that oral drugs might be perceived by patients as less effective than when drugs were delivered by injection. The questionnaire was given to 59 patients with advanced breast cancer who received oral chemotherapy. Ninety-percent of patients considered clear and completed the questionnaire. Oral chemotherapy was positively viewed by most patients, perceiving it as advantageous (58%), able to help them feel less ill (77%) and to reduce the effort in coping with the disease (67%). The most important feeling elicited was the sense of freedom. Younger patients (<45 years) required bigger effort to face their illness and expected the most from oral chemotherapy. The questionnaire was shown to be robust, reliable and reproducible instrument in assessing patients' prejudices towards oral anticancer treatments.

No abstract

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines, oral morphine is the first choice drug for treating moderate to severe cancer-related pain. The fear of the side effects caused by this drug and the scarce information about prevention and management of these effects are the main reasons for the underuse of morphine. The aim of this paper is to provide a review of the literature on the side effects most frequently present both in the titration phase and during chronic administration of oral morphine and to describe the appropriate treatment.

Background: Oral care is especially important in palliative care. Oral pain and adverse symptoms must be controlled during palliative care, because adequate communication with patients makes easy to perform good quality palliative care. In this case preserving verbal communication and comfortable mouth is very important. Aim: Our aim was to review the literature about the oral cavity complaints of patients with advanced cancer undergoing the pal-liative care, and to define which complaints are caused by direct impact of oncologic disease and which by the treatment methods. Materials and Methods: We reviewed most of the existing literature in this field. Unfortunately, there are not too much of publications about mouth problems of palliative patients with advanced cancer, but we used them to overview all known oral problems. Some of them report oral infections, some of them discuss the impact of the treatment methods and etc. We summarized all of them to create a real picture of oral cavity problems of palliative patients. Conclusion: Literature review proves that xerostomia, oral infections, taste alteration and other pathological conditions of oral cavity are very common in patients with advanced cancer. They lead to malnutrition and communication disorder and with the accompanying pathological condition decrease the quality of life. TCM-GMJ September 2017; 2(2):P20-P23)

We present three cases of Lhermitte's sign out of twenty consecutive cases of epidural spinal cord compression due to metastatic cancer. The three patients were diagnosed with epidural thoracic compressions. The literature on Lhermitte's sign is reviewed with emphasis on the differential diagnosis of this symptom in oncological patients.

The weekly administration of GEM and TAX is very well tolerated, and has shown promising antitumor activity in NSCLC. In view of the cumulative toxicity and of the pharmacokinetic profile of GEM, doses of 1500 mg/m2 of GEM and 100 mg/m2 of TAX are recommended for phase II studies.

Palliative care was initiated in Italy towards the end of the 1970s, mainly through the efforts of Professor Ventafridda and his colleagues. This article describes some of the most important steps made in this country to gain widespread acceptance for the principles and practice of palliative care. After about 15 years the Italian situation is still confusing. While some Regions have made progress, others are far from reaching even minimal goals. The efforts of many charities and of the Italian Society for Palliative Care and the Italian School for Palliative Medicine, have been huge, but still not sufficient to promote widespread involvement of the National Health Authorities. In the absence of clear Regional and central laws, the recent changes in the Italian health system combined with increasing financial difficulties threaten the advances already made.