Improving Care for Children with Vascular Tumors
I've been at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center two years. I was looking for a place to work with a cutting-edge environment for clinical research and a good vascular group, because the focus of my clinical research is on vascular tumors.
Coming from the East Coast to the Midwest was a big decision for my family. At first I was reluctant, but I came out for a day, and I was so impressed. There were wonderful clinicians. The research brilliance here was unbelievable. The future of this division was so exciting. And the people were so overwhelmingly warm and welcoming.
I think the fact that this division is growing so much is to its advantage. People are bringing good ideas from other places and just making this division even better.
When I started as clinical director of the oncology program, I wrote down all the things I thought needed to be changed. I recently reread my list and found we had accomplished the majority of the tasks.
One of the first things we did was establish practice guidelines. I think when you have a large program, you need clear guidelines, so we got together and decided what kind of road map we were going to use.
Because we are a very big hospital, with a large referral base, we get a lot of patients who have failed standard therapy. And so we really need to be the experts in new drugs and other elements of care. We have to be specialists. My own specialty is vascular anomalies. These are tumors and malformations involving blood vessels. They can range from simple birthmarks to devastating conditions. The majority of these anomalies need no treatment, but some are disfiguring and life threatening.
This is really a new medical specialty. It wasn't until the late 1980s that the different types of vascular anomalies were clearly identified. Then in the late 1990s, the most common type of vascular anomaly, hemangioma, was identified as a benign vascular tumor. We also realized that there are other life-threatening benign vascular tumors that need aggressive treatment, such as chemotherapy.
Because not much was known about vascular anomalies, in the past some patients would see dermatologists, some would see surgeons, some would see pediatricians. People were going from doctor to doctor. To improve care, specialists began getting together to form multidisciplinary groups so we could collaborate. We have a strong multidisciplinary team here at Cincinnati Children's.
There's so much more for us to learn about vascular anomalies and how to treat them. That's why we need more clinical and basic science research. I'm excited to have the opportunity to do this research here.
