Relevance of tumor boards for cancer rehabilitation
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EDITORIAL
Relevance of tumor boards for cancer rehabilitation Richard Crevenna 1 & Mohammad Keilani 1
# Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Relevance of tumor boards for cancer rehabilitation Modern cancer care with increasing survival rates puts the focus on rehabilitation in cancer survivorship which has been shown to have a key role in improving patients’ quality of life, functional performance, and participation [1]. There is an increasing interest to optimize the rehabilitation process, namely to have both—effective and also safe rehabilitation measures [1]. In their publication “Clinical questions on rehabilitation in cancer patients with skeletal metastasis: a content analysis of the multidisciplinary tumor board records” Yamanaka et al. describe a content analysis in the multidisciplinary tumor board records in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine of the Nara Medical University in Japan, which was established particularly for discussing bone metastases [2]. They discussed 168 consecutive patients with skeletal metastasis from January 2017 to September 2019 and conclude that there are three important aspects of patients suffering from metastatic bone disease, namely occurrence of skeletal events, patient age, and growth speed of tumors [2]. The authors mention that rehabilitation-related questions may reflect patients’ functional needs that occur more frequently in patients with pathological fractures or neurological symptoms, older patients, and patients with slow-growth tumors [2]. We fully agree with the authors and greatly appreciate their approach of a multidisciplinary tumor board to answer clinically relevant questions before and during cancer rehabilitation. To our opinion, “Tumor Board for Cancer Rehabilitation” is a clinically relevant option to support rehabilitative strategies in cancer patients. In November 2010, the worldwide first
* Richard Crevenna [email protected] 1
Department of Physical Medicine, Rehabilitation and Occupational Medicine, Medical University of Vienna, Waehringer Guertel 18-20, A-1090 Vienna, Austria
“Tumor Board for Cancer Rehabilitation” has been implemented at the Comprehensive Cancer Centre (CCC) Vienna of the Medical University of Vienna, Austria [3, 4]. Since this time, this tumor board became a very important interdisciplinary and multi-professional help to plan rehabilitation and supportive strategies in challenging cancer patients [3, 4]. In this tumor board, very challenging and complex cases are discussed to plan their rehabilitation. Their most important issues are decreased physical performance and fatigue, metastatic or lytic bone lesions, brain lesions, chemotherapyinduced peripheral neuropathy, and also cardiovascular and pulmonary disease and/or side effects of necessary (cancer) treatment, metabolic dysregulation, and lymphedema [5–9]. Referring to specialists from different medical specialties such as oncology, physical and rehabilitation medicine, radiology, radiation oncology, surgery, cardiology, and or
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