By Janice Staber, MD There have been years when the hemostasis and thrombosis community might have felt a little left behind at the ASH annual meeting. However, here in Orlando, sessions on hemostasis and thrombosis were discussed front and center. From the...
By Basem M. William, MD One of the major leaps in hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is the increasingly successful use of alternative donors, thereby allowing the delivery of a potentially curative transplant to approximately 75 percent of patients who do...
By Alexander Glaros, MD, and Ahmar U. Zaidi, MD In 1971, then-President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse to be “public enemy number one,” and The War on Drugs was born. It has now been nearly 50 years since the dawn of what proved to be a seismic shift in the focus...
By Ahmar U. Zaidi, MD “No conclusions can be drawn from this case. Not even a definite diagnosis can be made,” James Herrick wrote in 1910 about the case of the first known patient in America with sickle cell disease (SCD), Walter Clement Noel. More than one century...
By Ilana Yurkiewicz, MD “If you have to get cancer,” I once reassured a frightened patient, “CML [chronic myeloid leukemia] isn’t bad.” CML is truly one of our cancer success stories. The identification of a single genetic swap — BCR-ABL — and the development of...
By Ilana Yurkiewicz, MD Once upon a time, there was “7+3.” Developed in the 1970s, this easy-to-remember induction chemotherapy regimen for acute myeloid leukemia (AML) went largely unchanged for decades. But in the past few years, we have seen multiple new drug...
By Alexander K. Glaros, MD, and Ahmar U. Zaidi, MD If you’re a nerd like… Scratch that…If you’re in Orlando this week, it’s either because you have a favorite blood cell type (gotta be the sea blue histiocyte) or you still haven’t given up on your...
By Ahmar U. Zaidi, MD The first transfusions in the 19th century were rife with adverse events, poor outcomes, and even patient deaths. To no one’s surprise then, medical providers became dubious of this “dangerous” procedure. It was after Landsteiner and Jansky...
By Lynn Malec, MD, MSc, and Janice Staber, MD Your patient with a new blood clot doesn’t want to give herself shots, and the prospect of frequent lab work is going to be a deal-breaker. A direct oral anticoagulant (DOAC) seems like an obvious choice. But what if the...
By Binod Dhakal, MD, MS More than a century ago, the brilliant physicist Max Planck investigated an obscure subject and sparked a revolution in physics. A profoundly conservative thinker, Planck had to disavow some orthodox theoretical ideas to assume that the total...
By Basem M. William, MD Since Thomas Hodgkin’s initial characterization of lymphomas in 1832 and the first administration of mustard to a patient with lymphoma 100 years later amid the secrecy of a World War II gas program, much has changed. Multiple recurrent themes...
By Alexander K. Glaros, MD, and Ahmar U. Zaidi, MD In the social media community of patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) and their advocates, the moniker of “sickle cell warrior” has been widely adopted to unify those who struggle daily with the burden of this...
