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As a leader in cancer research, Karmanos is able to offer patients access to innovative treatments and clinical trials that are often times not available anywhere else.
To offer hope and longer life to patients with all types of cancer, Karmanos offers the latest types of therapy through our clinical trials program. Through clinical trials, we are creating new knowledge about how therapies fight cancer and provide national leadership in testing these new therapies.
We understand that cancer is a complex disease that demands complex care. We provide each patient with a dynamic, carefully constructed treatment plan focused on their specific cancer and their unique needs.
We listen to you to design a plan that provides you with respect, compassionate care and is responsive to your emotional and practical concerns.
Many pediatric cancer patients and their parents experience serious psychosocial and behavioral stressors and problems during and after completion of the course of treatment. Understanding the origins of these stressors and problems (i.e., risk factors) is a prerequisite for designing interventions to improve the pediatric cancer treatment experience and improving quality of survivorship outcomes. Program members are involved in a multi-site study at Children’s Hospital of Michigan (Detroit MI) and St Jude Children’s Hospital (Memphis, TN), focusing on how parents and children cope with and communicate during treatment-related clinic visits, found to be one of the most stressful aspects of the pediatric cancer experience for children and parents. In the first phase, we have identified specific parent cognitions and affect that serve to reduce their own and their children’s distress at the time of treatment and have long-term effects on parents’ own psychosocial well-being. One important finding is that higher caregiver self-efficacy at the time of treatments has beneficial effects for both patients and their parents. These findings have led to the development of a Motivational Interviewing intervention intended to increase parents’ self-efficacy at the time of difficult treatments. We are currently conducting a two-armed randomized clinical trial to evaluate the short- and longer-term impact of this intervention on psychosocial adjustment of both children and their parents.
In addition to our current intervention, we have identified certain enduring personal attributes (e.g., child resilience) that are associated with improved quality of life among pediatric cancer patients. These findings are providing the basis for a new R01 application, which will use long-term longitudinal data from the families in the current study to develop a profile of at-risk families and develop a “stepped” intervention intended to reduce the long-term risk of poor psychosocial outcome among families who have the greatest need.
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A $300,000 grant from Exhale – The Family Caregiver Initiative will allow the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute to continue providing its Give...