The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 280 No 7506 p712
14 June 2008

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Mobile telephones help cancer patients manage side effects

Teenagers with cancer are using mobile telephones to monitor the side effects of their chemotherapy treatment at home in an initiative that may be rolled out across the UK.

The young people, aged 13 to 18 years, can send details of any side effects via the phone to a central server at their hospital that is managed by specialist cancer nurses who can interpret the information.

The nurses can text the young person back with advice if necessary and, if the symptoms become severe, the technology allows a nurse to be paged to contact the young person at home.

The specially adapted phones, used by 40 young patients from the Royal Marsden and University College hospitals in London, also contain patient information about common side effects that the teenagers can access.

So far, the phones have been made available to teenagers with lymphoma, soft tissue sarcoma and bone tumours. Researchers hope they could, at a later date, be offered to young people with leukaemia as well.

Details of the project were given this week at the fifth international conference on teenage and young adult cancer medicine in London organised by the Teenage Cancer Trust charity.

The charity, which has funded the initiative with support from another charity CLIC Sargent, announced that the phones are now being used by another 150 young people at centres across the UK with the hope that the project will be rolled out across the UK in future.