"You might not have the visual acuity you'd need for a crucial diagnosis that you'd have in a reading room," Mr. Patel said.

The F.D.A. worked with the company on a way to mitigate this risk. The solution was software that includes an automatic test for poor lighting -- users must perceive and tap a small rectangle that appears faintly on the screen. "If you can't see the rectangle and touch it, you are in an area that is too bright," Mr. Cain said.

Adjustments like these, Mr. Patel said, will make the devices more usable.

BUSINESS DAY
Those Scan Results Are Just an App Away
By ANNE EISENBERG
Published: October 15, 2011
Businesses are developing apps that let a doctor's iPhone or iPad become a diagnostic medical instrument.

The findings, based on a study of 92 cancer patients at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, suggest that the cognitive losses that seem to follow many cancer treatments are far more pronounced and longer-lasting than commonly believed.

The study, published in The Journal of Clinical Oncology, is a vindication of sorts for many cancer patients, whose complaints about thinking and memory problems are often dismissed by doctors who lay blame for the symptoms on normal aging or the fatigue of illness.

"It's clearly established now that chemo brain does exist and can continue long-term," said Karen L. Syrjala, co-director of the Survivorship Program at Fred Hutchinson and the study's lead author. "The real issue here is that recovery from cancer treatment is not a one-year process but a two- to five-year process. People need to understand the extent to which the cells in their bodies have really been compromised by not only the cancer, but also the treatment."

I also dozed off where I least expected to. During radiation, I sometimes napped inside the TomoTherapy machine, lulled in my lassitude by Pink Floyd and Metallica. It was the radiation, which lasted more than seven weeks, that resulted in the most profound fatigue.

-- Dana Jennings

The report, appearing Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is an analysis of previously published studies. After accounting for variations in data among those studies, it concluded that cancer survivors in the United States and Europe were 37 percent more likely to be unemployed than healthy peers. In the United States, where it is particularly critical for survivors to hold on to jobs, because they provide health insurance, cancer patients may be at even greater risk of unemployment than patients in Europe, the study suggested.

According to the University Medical Center at the University
of Groningen in the Netherlands researchers, the damage to
the heart from some cancer drugs is a well known fact but
this is the first long-term study to track the effects of cancer
drugs on the heart that might occur years later.

As a resut of this study, researchers recommend that all
patients treated with drugs known as anthracyclines have
life-long heart function monitoring. They emphasis, even
with the study findings, that doxorubicin is a highly effective
cancer treatment. In addition, today's cancer patients tend
to receive lower doses of these cancer drugs, and
cardioprotective drugs, such as dexrazoxane, were not
available to cancer patients in the past.

Nausea and vomiting caused by chemotherapy remains one of the most
distressing side effects for patients undergoing treatment for cancer.
Depending upon the chemotherapy agents or regimens given, up to 90%
of patients may suffer from some form of chemotherapy-induced nausea
and vomiting (CINV). Besides significantly reducing a patient’s quality of
life, symptoms from CINV can be severely debilitating and often result in
patients refusing further courses of chemotherapy, which minimizes
chances for an optimal outcome. Furthermore, CINV is burdensome on
the medical system, as nurses must spend follow-up time with phone
calls or patient visits in addressing this issue. The time spent in dealing
with CINV creates a financial impact, and steals time from the healthcare
staff who could otherwise attend to other patients or medical issues.

A multi-institutional clinical trial was recently conducted to evaluate the
combination of Aloxi™ and Emend® in the prevention of CINV following
several different chemotherapy regimens that were moderately or
highly emetogenic.

Complete responses (no emesis and no additional medication for nausea
and vomiting) was achieved in 90% of patients during the acute phase, and
80% of patients in the delayed phase. During both the acute phase (first
24 hours) and the delayed phase (24-120 hours), 97% of patients
experienced no emesis.

Cancerhelp UK page.