Doctor shows something with a pen to two seated colleagues on a lighted wall with x-rays.

Tumor con­fer­ence – what role does it play?

Imag­ine the doc­tor treat­ing you who is not sure about his diag­no­sis when study­ing your radi­ol­o­gy find­ings: Is it can­cer or just an inflam­ma­tion? This deci­sion is very seri­ous. Should this great respon­si­bil­i­ty be placed in the hands of a sin­gle per­son, regard­less of expe­ri­ence? Or is it per­haps bet­ter if such an impor­tant deci­sion for the patient is made by a team of doc­tors? Clin­ics answer this ques­tion by estab­lish­ing a tumor conference.

Tumor con­fer­ences — the deci­sive factor

In most oncol­o­gy clin­ics, tumor con­fer­ences have been held on a week­ly basis for sev­er­al years. The tumor con­fer­ence takes place on the premis­es of a hos­pi­tal or in vir­tu­al pres­ence (online tumor con­fer­ence). Togeth­er they look at the radi­o­log­i­cal images and oth­er find­ings of select­ed cas­es. The doc­tor respon­si­ble presents the patient’s med­ical his­to­ry to the tumor con­fer­ence with the ques­tion of the right ther­a­py deci­sion. The head of the tumor con­fer­ence then mod­er­ates and con­trols the dis­cus­sion and records the deci­sion of the pan­el. At the tumor con­fer­ences, expe­ri­enced physi­cians from the onco­log­i­cal dis­ci­plines meet to dis­cuss the best ther­a­py for patients in an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary man­ner. They are accom­pa­nied by res­i­dent physi­cians and prac­ti­cal year stu­dents, who can learn some­thing new as part of the dis­cus­sion. If can­cer is par­tic­u­lar­ly com­pli­cat­ed, a sin­gle doc­tor can quick­ly be on the verge of being over­whelmed. There­fore, in many hos­pi­tals there are sev­er­al sep­a­rate spe­cial­ist tumor con­fer­ences (also called tumor boards) in order to involve experts from dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines in the plan­ning of fur­ther steps. Joint deci­sions result in the best indi­vid­ual ther­a­py con­cepts for patients.

The prin­ci­ple: all for one

It is pri­mar­i­ly the patient who ben­e­fits from the bundling of com­pe­tences in the gyne­co­log­i­cal tumor con­fer­ence. Tumor con­fer­ence patients often receive the most mod­ern ther­a­pies, some­times as part of clin­i­cal stud­ies. Even if you can­not take part in per­son for orga­ni­za­tion­al rea­sons (data pro­tec­tion), every­thing revolves around your ill­ness dur­ing the con­fer­ence. Rapid, inter­dis­ci­pli­nary dis­cus­sion and con­sid­er­a­tion of all aspects of the dis­ease and per­spec­tives means that effec­tive ther­a­py can be start­ed more quick­ly. All the knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence of the physi­cians present are thus bun­dled. The joint­ly made ther­a­py rec­om­men­da­tions are record­ed in pro­to­cols and sub­se­quent­ly dis­cussed with the patients.

Why is that important?

The tumor con­fer­ences are the start­ing point for effec­tive treat­ment and the key to the best pos­si­ble coor­di­nat­ed mul­ti-pro­fes­sion­al diag­nos­tics. Also and in par­tic­u­lar the sub­se­quent ther­a­py of malig­nant dis­eases (can­cer dis­eases) is based on the tumor con­fer­ence. Can­cer is a com­plex and very com­pre­hen­sive dis­ease. More and more tech­ni­cal­ly high­ly spe­cial­ized devices, advances in med­i­cines and sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge enable a good chance of recov­ery nowa­days. But this whole vari­ety of pro­ce­dures that sup­port the diag­no­sis can­not be over­seen by a sin­gle doc­tor. There are too many pos­si­bil­i­ties of imag­ing, patho­log­i­cal, mol­e­c­u­lar genet­ic and oth­er options. For this rea­son, guide­lines in the sense of evi­dence-based med­i­cine have been includ­ed in the tumor con­fer­ence. This means that dis­cus­sions and deci­sions must be based on sci­en­tif­ic results and facts. It is also impor­tant that the sur­geon does not decide on an oper­a­tion alone, the radio­ther­a­pist does not alone decide on radi­a­tion and no oncol­o­gist sim­ply decides on chemother­a­py with­out hav­ing checked togeth­er whether the oper­a­tion and radio­ther­a­py would not be the bet­ter alternatives.

Pio­neer uni­ver­si­ty medicine

Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary tumor con­fer­ences have their ori­gins in uni­ver­si­ty med­i­cine. Spe­cial­ized inter­dis­ci­pli­nary can­cer cen­ters (so-called Com­pre­hen­sive Can­cer Cen­ters, CCC) have been estab­lished. The think­ing behind it: Can­cer dis­eases are so com­plex that sev­er­al dis­ci­plines should be involved. In order to reflect this orga­ni­za­tion­al­ly, the CCCs devel­oped, which have now become the “stan­dard” for can­cer cen­ters. For rea­sons of trans­paren­cy and qual­i­ty, com­pli­ance with the ther­a­py rec­om­men­da­tions can be tracked through doc­u­men­ta­tion in the clin­i­cal can­cer reg­is­ter of the respec­tive CCC. The future of can­cer med­i­cine for the best treat­ment lies in mul­ti-pro­fes­sion­al teamwork.


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Fol­low Prof. Jalid Sehouli — Direc­tor of the Women’s Clin­ic at the Char­ité Vir­chow-Klinikum on Insta­gram (https://www.instagram.com/dr.sehouli/ ) to learn more about can­cer in gyne­col­o­gy. In small info­graph­ics you will be informed about cur­rent top­ics and sci­en­tif­ic findings.

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