A diagnosis of breast cancer is not only an immediate life-threatening situation. It is also a psychological shock, whose repercussions can extend well past a patient’s recovery and jeopardise the leading of a normal life in the long run. However, not everyone reacts the same way to such a radical change of circumstances, which can imply invasive clinical interventions, radiotherapy and harsh chemotherapy regimens – and later strict surveillance to watch for recurrence.

This event, which was one of the first in the last 18 months to welcome back in-person participants as well as those online, had one question at its core: what do we need to know about digital health and patient-centred medicine?

What does physiotherapy have to do with cancer?

“Physiotherapy is an integral part of the cancer treatment and recovery plan: it promotes the patients’ life quality and overall sense of well-being by restoring movement, function and strength.” - Champalimaud Foundation Physiotherapy Team.

Right now, lung cancer is the most lethal cancer in the world. Eighty percent of its victims are smokers, making smoking a determinant risk factor for this cancer. But according to oncologist Nuno Gil, who heads the Lung Unit at the Champalimaud Clinical Centre, smoking is not the ultimate cause of lung cancer. First, many smokers never develop lung cancer, and second, a growing number of non-smokers have this disease. Nuno Gil would really like to solve this mystery.

This therapeutic approach is still far from being mainstream practice. But according to the latest research, it could actually prevent hundreds of thousands of invasive surgeries worldwide every year.

To celebrate International Nurses Day, we asked Champalimaud Foundation’s oncology nurses to explore the parallels between their personal and professional lives. From cooking to photography, from Crossfit to ballroom dancing, what similarities with nursing do they find?

The original idea came from a gastroenterologist at the Champalimaud Foundation, in Lisbon. But transforming it into the object that now embodies it took several years of work by a team of scientists, doctors and engineers in Portugal and Belgium. The first results of a pilot study of this non-surgical device, called MAGUS (for Magnetic Gastrointestinal Universal Septotome), which performs a “cut and paste” procedure in the human body, were announced in 2020.

Studies have suggested for years that dogs are masters at detecting disease thanks to their exceptional sense of smell. Experts agree that their success most probably lies in their ability to sniff out so-called volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, in the air people exhale. In the last few years, more than 1,000 VOCs have been identified in human breath, and scientists are now seeking to determine which ones could be relevant cancer biomarkers.

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Today, the growing consensus among experts is that surgery should no longer be the only therapeutic option in rectal cancer treatment. A non-invasive approach, the Watch-and-Wait protocol – which drastically reduces the toll of the disease on patients’ quality of life – has increasingly shown promising results for the treatment of such tumours. A new study now explores the next logical step: whether these patients should be submitted for life or just for a certain period to the stringent follow-up required by the protocol.