ASCO Care and Treatment Recommendations for Patients
ASCO Care and Treatment Recommendations for Patients are easy-to-read summaries based on ASCO Clinical Practice Guidelines that offer a patient-oriented view of the guidelines: providing background information, discussing the recommendations, explaining what those recommendations mean for patients, and providing a list of questions patients can ask their doctors for more information. The date on each guideline is when ASCO last published an update in response to new or revised scientific evidence. Each guideline listed here is considered the best available information on this topic to date.
All guides are available in text or in PDF format. Selected ASCO Care and Treatment Recommendations for Patients have been translated into Spanish and are available in Cancer.Net's En Español section.
ASCO welcomes feedback from the cancer community, including patients, about its clinical practice guideline development process, by providing feedback or submitting evidence on individual published guidelines. Learn more at this website.
Watch a patient education video led by Dr. Mark Kris explaining treatment guidelines.
To help doctors give their patients the best possible care, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the College of American Pathologists (CAP) developed evidence-based recommendations to improve the accuracy of testing for estrogen and progesterone receptors for breast cancer. This guide for patients is based on ASCO’s and CAP’s recommendations.
ASCO recently updated a clinical practice guideline about the use of white blood cell growth factors. This patient guide is based on ASCO's recommendations.
To help doctors give their patients the best possible care, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) developed evidence-based recommendations on the usefulness of laboratory tests (called assays) to find out if a cancer might be resistant or sensitive to a specific chemotherapy treatment before it is offered to a patient. In 2011, this guideline was reviewed due to new research; this research continued to support the 2004 recommendations. This guide for patients is based on ASCO’s most recent recommendations.
To help doctors give their patients the best possible care, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and the American Society of Hematology (ASH) developed evidence-based recommendations about the use of epoetin (Epogen, Procrit) or darbepoetin (Aranesp) for chemotherapy-related anemia. In 2010, this guideline was updated to reflect results of recent clinical studies and a new analysis of combined data on the use of these drugs. It also summarizes the changes to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) approved prescribing recommendations. This guide for patients is based on the most recent ASCO and ASH recommendations.