The American Cancer Society is taking survivorship seriously

American Cancer Society prostate cancer survivorship care guidelines. By Skolarus et al. 2014

 

Key sentence from the paper: “To promote comprehensive follow-up care and optimal health and quality of life for the posttreatment survivor, the guidelines address health promotion, surveillance for prostate cancer recurrence, screening for second primary cancers, long-term and late effects assessment and management, psychosocial issues, and care coordination among the oncology team, primary care clinicians, and nononcology specialists.

 

For the full abstract, see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24916760  

  

Commentary: The American Cancer Society (ACS) is a highly respected organization and their consensus report on survivorship (with 12 authors) is getting a fair bit of media coverage. From the perspective of LIFEonADT, there is one problematic item in Table 1 in the paper which lists side effects of ADT. There the authors include “dry eyes” as a side effect of ADT. Dry eyes are not mentioned in the ADT Book. So, did we mess up?

We looked into the literature to justify its inclusion on the ACS list, but could not find evidence to support the ACS listing. It appears that dry eyes is more likely related to aging. We brought this to the attention of the authors of this paper and hope that they will remove dry eyes from the list of ADT side effects in their paper. There are enough side effects for patients to worry about addressing that are well-established without unnecessarily inflating the list.

 

Skolarus TA, Wolf AM, Erb NL, Brooks DD, Rivers BM, Underwood W, 3rd, Salner AL, Zelefsky MJ, Aragon-Ching JB, Slovin SF, Wittmann DA, Hoyt MA, Sinibaldi VJ, Chodak G, Pratt-Chapman ML, Cowens-Alvarado RL. 2014. American Cancer Society prostate cancer survivorship care guidelines. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 64(4):225-249.