Maturing patients, maturing therapy

The next session I attended was an industry sponsored session on Maturing Patients, Maturing therapy: Multidisciplinary management in HIV.  The session on management of Cancer in HIV by Christine Katlama (Professor of Infectious Diseases and Head of the HIV Clinical Research Unit
Department of Infectious Diseases France) & Jean-Philippe Spano (Professor in Medical Oncology, in the Department of Medical Oncology of Pr. David Khayat at the Pitié-Salpétrière Hospital in Paris, France) highlighted the increasing medical issue of people living with HIV and cancer diagnoses.  Amongst some interesting case studies, the main points discussed were that viral-induced cancers are more prevalent in HIV positive patients compared with HIV negative patients, the impact of smoking is excessive and needs addressing and multidisciplinary team approaches are extremely important to maximise the therapeutic management of HIV patients with cancers.

They demonstrated a great example of this collaboration in the form of a 6 weekly web-conference that they have set up in Paris between Oncologists, HIV specialists, pharmacists and immunologists where they discuss cases and ensure any possible treatment interactions between ART and chemotherapy are evaluated by experts as well as consideration of the possible benefits of new immune therapies. Whilst perhaps not the direct purpose of the session I found the take home message for me was thinking about the importance of cancer screening and prevention in the comorbidity assessments of stable HIV positive clients that nurses are increasingly involved with.  Smoking cessation should be continually encouraged and revisited at every possible occasion in a supportive way as unsurprisingly tobacco smoking is attributable to many of the cancers diagnosed.