Chemotherapy is the most conventional treatment against cancer. It uses medication to kill cells, and in particular cancer cells. But it does not target cancer cells specifically. It can be used by itself or in combination with other treatments, such as radiotherapy (see below) or surgery, to make them more effective.

Chemotherapy is usually administered intravenously at a hospital in the course of several sessions, but it can also consist of tablets taken at home. It can include one drug or a combination of drugs.

Adjuvant cancer treatments are the most conventional, most classic therapeutic approach to cancer. Here, the first step is usually surgery to remove the tumour, followed by chemotherapy, radiotherapy or other additional treatments to consolidate the surgery’s results.

Early diagnosis aims to detect cancer in its early stages when it is potentially curable. This can apply not only to people who already have symptoms of a given cancer, but also to those who, not having any symptom, are subject to known risk factors that justify this approach.

Mr. P. started to be followed at the smoking cessation consultation of the Champalimaud Foundation in mid-2018. He had been a smoker for 33 years, and in 2018, he smoked around one pack of cigarettes a day. His first attempt to quit failed, but Mr. P. never quit the consultation and never gave up on quitting smoking. He finally achieved his goal in mid-2020 through a multidisciplinary approach (including psychology and psychiatry consultations) – and, to this day, has never smoked again.

What do the terms incidence and prevalence stand for? What do they measure? What are they used for?

Incidence and prevalence are two statistical measures of disease frequency that apply to any and every disease, although here we’ll just be concerned with cancer.

Metaplasia, dysplasia, neoplasia are three processes of cellular transformation.

Metaplasia occurs when a type of cell transforms itself into another normal cell type, as an adaptive response to adverse environmental conditions (for example, inflamation).

A woman who’s just had one of her breasts entirely removed, which forever leaves her with a huge scar across half of her chest, might be very satisfied with the result. If this was her only option, what obviously most matters to her is to be rid of the disease. But for another, who has submitted to a more advanced breast surgery – that is equally successful in clinical terms, but also more conservative and reconstructive – might on the other hand find her new look highly unsatisfactory in spite of the aesthetic results of the surgery being flawless.

The title of the new book is “Technology at the Service of the Humanization of Oncological Care”. It was launched during the V Champalimaud Oncological Nursing Conference, held on May 4th 2022 at the Champalimaud Foundation, in Lisbon.

The event should have taken place in 2020, marking the WHO’s International Nursing Day by commemorating the bicentenary of the birth (on 12 May 2020) of Florence Nightingale, the “mother of all nurses”.

Yesterday, May 5th, at 3p.m. (Lisbon time), surgeon Pedro Gouveia was in the operating room, at the Breast Unit of the Champalimaud Foundation, in Lisbon, ready to start, as in so many other occasions, performing breast cancer surgery. Meanwhile, another surgeon from the same unit, the young Spaniard Rogelio Andrés-Luna, was attending the operation, and intervening, when needed, by supplying Pedro Gouveia with additional information to help him – and even guide his gestures. Everything seems to be business as usual – but it isn’t.