Cancer patients comprise about 15-20% of all patients admitted into Intensive Care Units (Bos et al. 2015; Shimalbukuro-Vornhagen et al. 2016); Approximately 50% of these admissions are due to surgical procedures, while the other 50% is related to medical causes, with only 3.3% corresponding to specific causes of oncological disease (Puxty et al. 2015).
 

March was Multiple Myeloma Awareness Month. In this short video, Cristina João, Haemato-oncologist of the Haemato-oncology Unit at the Champalimaud Foundation, explains what this pathology is and talks about the activities that the Unit has developed for improving the care of people with Multiple Myeloma. She also points out that, in addition to clinical activity, the Haemato-Oncology Unit does translational research through the Foundation's Lymphoma and Myeloma Research Group, which she leads.

Neste último vídeo da série, Laura Fernández, Cirurgiã Colorretal, fala da investigação da equipa sobre o Protocolo Watch&Wait (W&W).

Em estudos recentes, mostraram que a probabilidade de os doentes com cancro retal, que permanecem livres de tumores durante cinco anos, voltarem a desenvolver a doença é quase nula. Atualmente, a equipa está a tentar determinar quais os doentes, integrados no programa W&W, que serão mais susceptíveis de apresentar metástases.

On behalf of the International Cancer Imaging Society (ICIS) and the Champalimaud Foundation, we would like to invite you to register for our jointly hosted meeting 'AI and Machine Learning in Cancer Imaging 3.0', which will be held on 30 June and 1 July 2023.  The meeting will take place at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, in Lisbon. 

In Portugal, the winning scientists are Isabel Gordo (Gulbenkian Institute of Science, IGC), Maria Manuel Mota (João Lobo Antunes Institute of Molecular Medicine, iMM), Mariana Pinho (ITQB-NOVA) and Henrique Veiga-Fernandes (Champalimaud Foundation). Each will receive between €2.5M and €3.5M for the development of research projects over the next five years.

In this video, Oriol Parés, Radiation Oncologist at the Champalimaud Foundation's Radiation Oncology Service, presents the advantages of the Watch and Wait (W&W) protocol in trying to avoid rectal surgery in low rectal cancer patients, sparing them from the decline of defecatory, urinary and sexual functions that can result from radiochemotherapy followed by surgery.

In patients with low rectal cancer, it may be necessary to completely remove the rectum. This implies permanently redirecting the colon towards an incision made in the abdomen, called a stoma. The patient is then fitted for life with a “bag” to collect stools directly through that artificial orifice.

In this video, nurse Tatiana Quaresma, of the stomatherapy team at the Digestive Unit, explains how the team’s intervention, before and after such a type of rectal surgery, is important in dealing with the physical and psychological impact of the procedure. 

Surgery continues to be central in colorectal cancer treatment.

In this short video, surgeon Pedro Vieira describes the state-of-art practice of colorectal surgery at the Champalimaud Foundation, with a particular emphasis on robotic surgery, the gold standard in rectal surgery, and minimally invasive surgery, which Digestive Unit surgeons favour whenever possible.

There are different ways to classify cancers: for instance, by the organ (or tissue) in which they originate, and by the type of cells they involve. Cancers can be solid (tumour-forming) or liquid (blood cancers).

Using the first method yields more than 200 different types of cancer. In alphabetical order, the most common are: bladder cancer, breast cancer, colon and rectal cancer, endometrial cancer, kidney cancer, leukemia (blood cancer), liver cancer, lung cancer melanoma (skin cancer), non-Hodgkin lymphoma, pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, and thyroid cancer.

The past 10 years have witnessed a doubling of colorectal cancers (CRC) in people under 50 years of age – from 5% to 10% of all cases. Just in the US, between 2008 and 2015, this increase was over 60%!