We are pleased to highlight a new publication written on behalf of the IPOS Research Committee. During the Research Committee meeting at the Rotterdam World Congress, the Committee identified a need for additional guidance for psycho-oncology researchers surrounding the selection of patient-reported measures for use in cancer patients and survivors. The Committee collaborated throughout 2013 and came to a consensus that depression was the first priority issue surrounding measurement selection in psycho-oncology. The Committee agreed to adopt a meta-review design to review all reviews of patient-reported depression measures in cancer published in the last 15 years. At the Lisbon World Congress, the Committee agreed on final refinements to the design of the study, which was then conducted and written, by Dr Claire Wakefield with the support of Professors Phyllis Butow, Neil Aaronson, Thomas Hack, Nicholas Hulbert-Williams and Paul Jacobsen. The meta-review was recently published in the Lancet Psychiatry. With its publication, the Research Committee hopes to ensure that investigators are using the best performing measures, to encourage consistency across data collection and reporting, and to create future opportunities for cross-study comparisons.

The full text of the article is available on the IPOS website (for IPOS members only), or at the following link: View Link

The American Cancer Society has updated the guidelines for breast cancer screening. Under the new guidelines, breast cancer screening can be started at age 45 instead of 40 (http://www.cancer.org/cancer/news/news/american-cancer-society-releases-new-breast-cancer-guidelines). At the same time, organizations such as Mayo Clinic and Breastcancer.org stand by their recommendation that all women have mammograms annually starting at age 40. (http://www.breastcancer.org/research-news/acs-guidelines-recommend-mammograms-at-45). Nancy L. Keating stated in an editorial in JAMA (http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2463237) that the debate is far from settled elsewhere in the world.