STRESS MANAGEMENT AND CANCER PATIENTS

Therapy to Improve Life Quality & Cope Stress in Patients With Cancer

THERAPY TO IMPROVE LIFE QUALITY & COPE STRESS IN PATIENTS WITH CANCER

Introduction

According to a recent report published by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, approximately 3 million residents of the 25 member states of the European Union (EU) were diagnosed with cancer in 2004. In that same year, approximately 1.7 million EU residents died from this disease. Since 1981, cancer has been the leading cause of death in Japan, and cancer mortality in that country has grown rapidly - from 217,413 recorded deaths in 1990 to 320,358 in 2004.

These figures graphically demonstrate the dreadful social cost of cancer. The economic burden imposed by this disease - in terms of both the direct costs of treatment and the indirect costs of disability, lost income and taxation, and premature death - is also terrible. Innovative cancer therapies can play an important role in mitigating the impact of cancer, but these drugs are often expensive. Consequently, government agencies have the unenviable task of determining how best to stretch finite resources to cover these treatments.

In this chapter, we provide a detailed overview of the current reimbursement environment for cancer therapies in the five largest European markets (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) and Japan. In addition, we assess the outlook and implications for the pharmaceutical industry in terms of the coverage of oncology drugs. (Taylor, 2003)

Therapies to Improve Life Quality of Cancer Patients

A number of new therapies and technologies have begun to develop prominence in the treatment of cancer. These include treatment of cancer with antiangiogenic factors, cancer vaccines—either gene therapy based or otherwise, biological agents that stimulate potent antitumor immune responses, monoclonal antibodies, COX-2 inhibitors, and other targeted biological cancer therapies. New physical methods or technologies that have been developed or improved for the treatment of cancer include cryosurgery, hyperthermia, laser treatment, photodynamic therapy, and radiation therapy.

Antiangiogenic factors are an attractive approach to treating cancer because they prevent new blood vessels from forming. This prevents oxygen and other nutrient supplies from reaching cancer cells, thereby inhibiting proliferation. In vivo, suppression of angiogenesis has prevented new blood vessels from forming, which resulted in tumor regression and elimination. Despite these positive results in mice studies, however, it has not yet been determined whether suppression of angiogenesis will be as efficacious in humans. Cancer vaccines can be used to treat an existing cancer (therapeutic) or to prevent the cancer from ever forming (prophylactic). Both prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines have shown significant potential in the treatment of tumors. Therapeutic vaccines work by bolstering the body's natural immune defenses against preexisting cancers. Therapeutic vaccines are able to suppress further growth of tumors and are an attractive approach for preventing recurrence of the tumor following resections. They also provide a mechanism by which to destroy cancer cells that were not killed during prior alternative treatments. Prophylactic vaccines are given to healthy patients to stimulate an immune response against viruses that have the ...