Author: Sibel Cavdar
Origin/Affiliation: Ege University Medical Faculty Hospital, Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Geriatrics. Izmir, Turkey.
As a member of ECGI reporters group, I had opportunity to attend ‘SIOG’ International Society of Geriatric Oncology annual conference between 28th and 30th of October in Geneva. I felt my self lucky for joining such an important event. There were 20 scientific sessions, 60 talks, 13 oral abstract presentations, and 226 posters and the geriatric assessment workshop which I could not join because of my flight. The theme of this year was ‘celebrating resilience’ which was very interesting and attractive and it was my reason attending 2022 SIOG conference. The hot topics were; ‘’quality of life, geriatric comanagement, minimum invasive surgery, perioperative care, preoperative assessment, enhanced recovery, desicion-making process, prehabilition, and fraility’’.
On October the 28th programme began with poster welcome reception and poster walk. At the opening reception, the side flute concert by ex-president Dr. Etienne Brain and Dr. Holly Holmes was really impressive while the chosen posters were being discussed. The next day started with rapid fire updates . Dr. Giampaolo Ugolini gave a speech about recent articles related to cancer surgery. He highlighted the importance of perioperative geriatric comanagement which decreases postopertive mortalities, the necessary of prehabilition integration into routine perioperative period, and an interesting home-recovery surgical care model based on diagnostic activities of daily living assessments. In terms of updates on hematology, Dr. Raul Cordoba told the importance of comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA) on hematological treatment decision in older patients, and indicated that functional and mobility impairment, as well as comorbidities and age are predictive factors. Dr. Armin Shahrokni updated geriatrics and emphasised the mobility capacity as an important and easy to measure health indicator with current articles. In the updated randomized trials; GAP, GAIN studies which focused on geriatric assessment to decrease toxicity and GO-SAFE study which aimed to define quality of life and functional results before and after cancer surgery were underlined.
In the session ‘Setting Up Oncogeriatric Care Services Using The Consultative Geriatric Oncology Model’, Dr. Valentin Goede mentioned the heterogenous landscape of oncogeriatric care service teams and the effect of the multidisiplanary team compositions on the patients. Intervention protocol with geriatric consultation or oncology team are the best oncogeriatric care services among multidisiplanary team compositions. In the plenary session of “Internal Capacity as a Measure of Resilience in Older Adults”, resilience was discussed both by Dr. By Janice Tsang and Dr. Laura Frain for oncological and geriatric aspects. They mentioned the inadequacy of traditional disease oriented model of healthcare, and the need for holistic approaches, prevention of functional declines and maintanence of functional ability due to tumor heterogeneity. Functional ability was defined as the combination and interaction of intrinsic capacity (IC) with the environment a person inhabits. IC consists of mental and physical capacities and has 5 major domains: locomotion, cognition, vitality, sensory, psychology. IC became more prevalent than frailty for evaluating older patients with cancer however physical resilience would take place in future. Resilience was described as a dynamic ability and adaptive response to bounce back or return to normal homeostasis from acute stressors.On 30th of October, patient related outcome measures in elderly population and immunotherapy in older cancer patients were the interesting sessions. At the SIOG/EUGMS joint session many aspects of sarcopenia were discussed with the chair Dr. Claire Falandry.
At last, it was an effective and enjoyable congress for me and I learned a lot.There were many good topics, very valuable speakers and very high quality speeches that I could not write about here. Many thanks to international society of geriatric oncology for the collaborations with EUGMS-ECGI. I recommend all early career geriatricians to attend the next conference between 9-11 November 2023 in Valencia and I am looking forward to it.
