COMMIT TED TO
COMPASSION & CARE Young Adults with Blood Cancer: Why It’s Better to Treat Them Like Kids Jenn Georges recently completed her master’s degree and started a new job. She is busy planning her upcoming wedding. With her adult life on track, the 24-year-old doesn’t mind that when it came to fighting leukemia, she was treated — in one way — like a child.
“We are testing the pediatric regimen in young adults ages 16 to 39 to assess toxicity, tolerance and compliance.” Final results from the trial will be reported next year. In August, the University of Chicago Medicine began a new program designed specifically for AYAs. The clinic’s multidisciplinary medical team includes adult and pediatric hematologists, advanced practice nurses and social workers, as well as specialists in survivorship, psychology, fertility and genetics.
Diagnosed with cancer soon after graduating from college downstate in 2009, the Lombard, Ill., resident returned home to get her care at “In addition to offering the latest therapies the University of Chicago Medicine. In her for these patients, we address personal initial meeting with hematologist-oncologist and psychosocial issues and other medical Wendy Stock, MD, Georges learned that a challenges that are unique to AYAs,” said clinical trial testing a pediatric protocol for Stock, co-director of the program. young adults battling leukemia could give her the best chance at survival. Georges told NEW CANCER PROGRAM Stock to “sign me up.” Georges is part of a distinct group of patients referred to as AYAs: adolescents and young adults with cancer. Until recently, most AYAs with leukemia were treated on adult protocols. But a 2008 retrospective study conducted by Stock Jenn Georges and her colleagues demonstrated that patients treated on pediatric regimens had higher survival rates. This observation led to the nationwide clinical trial that enrolled Georges and more than 300 other patients. “While the adult and pediatric chemotherapy drugs are the same, the doses and schedules are different,” explained Stock. “The intensity of the pediatric therapy gets harder to tolerate as patients age.
AIMED AT YOUNG ADULTS
The new Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) Oncology Program at the University of Chicago Medicine helps young adults take an active role in their care. We offer diagnostic, treatment and support services for young adults (ages 15 to 30) with leukemia or lymphoma. As leaders in AYA cancer research, the experts on our medical team have access to the latest clinical trials and protocols. The AYA Oncology Program sees patients in the Comer Center for Children and Specialty Care, a new state-of-the-art outpatient clinic and infusion suite adjacent to the University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital on the medical center’s Hyde Park campus.
For more information about the AYA Oncology Program, visit uchospitals.edu/ specialties/cancer/young-adult. | A B O V E , L E F T | Jenn Georges, 24, was the first patient seen in the new AYA clinic at the University of Chicago Medicine.
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Working to Overcome Barriers to Breast Cancer Treatment in Nigeria Liese Pruitt, a third-year student at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, recently visited Ibadan, Nigeria, for the second time to study social and cultural barriers that cause women there to delay treatment for breast cancer. Pruitt, whose research was funded by the Dennis Lee and Anita Cheng Lee Global Health Scholarship, thinks there are ways to cut through misinformation about breast cancer and get women care sooner. She hopes to pilot an education program by collaborating with clerics to urge women to seek medical care in addition to spiritual healing when they find a breast lump. “Liese’s work has opened new opportunities for interventions to improve breast cancer outcomes in low-resource settings,” said Olufunmilayo I. Olopade, MD, director of the Cancer Risk Clinic at the University of Chicago Medicine.
COLON CANCER SCREENING INITIATIVE The University of Chicago Medicine has partnered with the American Cancer Society Illinois Division in a statewide initiative to increase colorectal cancer awareness and screenings in at-risk populations, including members of the African-American and AsianAmerican communities on Chicago’s South Side.