Achieving health equity in cancer care in the Philippines Rey Arturo T Fernandez1 and Frederic Ivan L Ting2,3 1Ateneo Professional Schools, Graduate Sch

This essay describes a physician’s shift to patient-focused language in treatment of patients with cancer.

Current treatments for metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) have improved survival but remain non-curative, primarily aiming to control disease and to extend life. Structured exercise has demonstrated clinical and quality-of-life benefits in early-stage NSCLC. This systematic review assesses the impact of adjunctive exercise programs on health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in advanced NSCLC patients, with safety as a secondary outcome. Of 1168 studies screened, 13 met the inclusion criteria. All eligible studies were included in the systematic review, and three underwent meta-analysis. Using Synthesis Without Meta-analysis (SWiM), the findings were heterogeneous: four studies showed positive outcomes, two had mixed results, and seven showed negative outcomes. Meta-analysis of studies utilizing the EORTC-C30 tool demonstrated a positive mean difference of 1.57 (95% CI: 0 to 3.14), indicating a trend toward HRQoL improvement. Safety analyses largely revealed no major adverse events related to exercise interventions. Future studies must therefore be designed to account for confounders intrinsic to the underlying disease of study participants to better determine both the efficacy and the safety of structured, adjunctive exercise programs in this patient population.

Treatment landscape of patients with HER2+ early breast cancer: an overview Frederic Ivan L Ting1,2 1Department of Clinical Sciences, College of Medici

Introduction: Hematological malignancies (HMs) represent a diverse spectrum of hematopoietic and lymphoid neoplasms involving the blood, bone marrow, and lymphatic organs. Better understanding of the burden of HMs in East Asia will allow for more targeted policy and public health efforts. Methods: Using the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2021, we extracted 2021 and 1990–2021 trend estimates for total counts and age-standardized rates (per 100,000 person-years) for incidence, mortality, and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for leukemia and subtypes, multiple myeloma (MM), non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), and Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) in East Asia (China, Japan, North Korea, Republic of Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan). Results: In 2021, the burden of HMs globally and in East Asia was driven by China and Japan. China had the highest global HM burden with 238,051 new cases, 117,188 deaths, and 3.9 million DALYs. NHL and leukemia accounted for the majority of new cases, deaths, and DALYs in all countries. From 1990 to 2021, in most HMs and countries the age-standardized incidence rate (ASIR) increased, while the age-standardized mortality rate (ASMR) and age-standardized DALY rate (ASDALYR) decreased. The notable exception is the significant increase of MM ASIR, ASMR, and ASDALYR in Mongolia, Taiwan, and China, with increases in China by 200–300%. Conclusions: With the significant contribution to the global burden of HMs from China and Japan, diagnosis and treatment of HMs in these two countries should be a primary global health focus. The significant relative increase of MM ASIR, ASMR, and DALYs across many East Asia countries, especially in China, highlights MM as an important public health focus. Significant variations between the other East Asia countries also warrant further country- and disease-specific investigations.

As the academe in health professions institutions pursue educational reforms that anchors on the systems approach to healthcare, collaborative efforts are essential to establish more responsive and dynamic professional education systems. This paper highlights comparative education as a tool to strengthen health professions education around the world by reviewing previous and the most recent studies done, and showcase how this can improve the current pedagogical landscape. Through comparative education, a holistic approach to health professions education ensures that the learner’s training is not only comprehensive but also responsive to the dynamic needs of the country, the region, and the rest of the world by the sharing of best practices, challenges, and opportunities for collaboration. The opportunities that international comparative education provide to the health professions education include the sharing of best practices and difficulties encountered, and the enhanced viewpoint from considering different perspectives. On the other hand, the main challenges include ethnocentrism and the limited resources that majority of institutions face globally especially those from the low- and middle-income countries. Truly, once the lessons learned from comparative educational engagements are integrated into the philosophical and educational foundations in our medical schools, then we are one step closer to becoming responsive to the call for a more holistic and systems – centered health professions education.