Virtual Palliative Care Improves Quality of Life in Advanced Lung Cancer

In this exclusive MedPage Today video, Roy Herbst, MD, PhD, of Yale Cancer Center in New Haven, Connecticut, discusses a study presented at the recent American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting, which showed that patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer receiving palliative care via video consultation had outcomes comparable to those treated in person.

Following is a transcript of his remarks:

We’ve known for almost a decade now or more, that if you treat patients palliatively, you support their symptoms, they do better in their lung cancer outcome. It sort of makes sense. If someone has fewer symptoms, they’re more able to go through their therapies, they have a better quality of life.

This trial actually did a very interesting thing in the era of COVID — palliative care delivered by video versus in person. It’s impossible to do in person for everyone. Access is the biggest issue we have in cancer, in all of medicine, these days. And actually, I was very happy to see the early results that came out that patients did about the same, whether they got this by video or in person.

Sure, there’s going to be preferences between patients. We’ll look forward to seeing all the different subgroups. But very important because this is now going to allow, for example, at Yale Cancer Center where I am, we have 15 sites — our palliative care team can’t deliver and visit every site, but they can perhaps do videos in a much more efficient way. So maybe you see someone the first time in person and then you do some video visits. It’s all good.

So it’s really exciting. Other things at this meeting, further updating our use of ADCs, antibody-drug conjugates, some of them are a bit disappointing, but I’d say the real advances are the ones that I mentioned.

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