Reaching a pinnacle may be even better the second time around.

City of Hope is one of 36 facilities nationwide, and the only one in Southern California, to receive the 2010 Press Ganey Summit Award for inpatient care. It is the second straight year the institution has received the award.

Press Ganey surveys inpatients after discharge about a variety of topics related to their stay, including general satisfaction with the hospital’s services, speediness of admission, room cleanliness and staff courtesy.

Scores are then compiled, analyzed and compared with those from other facilities of similar size. The Summit Award is given to hospitals with patient satisfaction scores in the 95th percentile for three consecutive years.

Press Ganey currently partners with more than 10,000 health-care facilities — including more than 40 percent of U.S. hospitals — to measure and improve the quality of their care.

For more information on the Summit Award, visit www.pressganey.com/pressganeyawards and select “Summit Award” from the left-hand menu.

For some liver cancer patients, their best hope for a cure is a new liver; but the need for healthy donor livers far exceeds the supply. With so few livers available for transplant, ensuring each match is successful becomes especially important.

Clinical researchers in City of Hope’s departments of Surgery and Population Sciences recently teamed with colleagues at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles to test if a key protein could help predict the odds of success for liver transplant to treat liver cancer. Their results appeared in the January issue of Archives of Surgery.

Using the United Network of Organ Sharing database, the team studied the records of nearly 2,300 liver cancer patients who had received a whole, healthy liver to replace their diseased one.

The researchers checked patients’ pretransplant blood levels of a protein called alpha-fetoprotein, or AFP, and weighed those against treatment outcomes.

“We found that patients who had elevated serum AFP levels prior to transplant were less likely to survive in the years after transplant than those with lower AFP levels,” said Joseph Kim, M.D., associate professor of surgery.

Patients in the low AFP group had a 76 percent overall chance of surviving four years after transplant, significantly higher than the 57 percent survival seen among patients with high AFP.

Because of the scant supply of healthy donor livers, transplant physicians recognize the need to improve the criteria used to qualify patients for liver transplant. However, the idea of passing over patients who may have a poor prognosis raises controversy, since reliable methods of determining who will benefit most from the procedure remain elusive.

“AFP might be a useful biomarker for helping to determine the best way to allocate a limited supply of donated livers,” Kim said, “but more research to confirm the usefulness of AFP blood levels, as well as other methods, is needed.”

As if battling their disease is not enough, cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy often must cope with severe nausea and vomiting. City of Hope medical oncologist Thehang Luu, M.D., may have taken an important step in helping physicians and patients manage these debilitating side effects by determining a group of patients most at risk.

Chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, or CINV, remains among the most common adverse side effects related to a class of drugs called anthracyclines. Anthracyclines are derived from bacteria and include medications like doxorubicin.

Advances in symptom management, including powerful medicines called antiemetics, have curbed the nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy, but as many as half of all patients still experience the symptoms, according to Luu, clinical assistant professor in the Department of Medical Oncology & Therapeutics Research.

“Aside from the obvious effect on quality of life, CINV can interfere with patients’ ability to continue their treatment,” she said.

As she treated patients over the years, Luu noticed a pattern: The severity of nausea and vomiting seemed to vary according to cancer patients’ ethnicities. This led Luu and a team of City of Hope researchers to examine four years’ worth of medical records of 300 women who underwent chemotherapy for breast cancer.

Laura Bourdeanu, Ph.D., R.N., M.S.N., nurse practitioner in the Department of Medical Oncology & Therapeutics Research, performed much of the data collection and statistical analysis on the records.

“We found that Asian patients had more severe nausea and vomiting symptoms, even when accounting for other variables,” said Bourdeanu, who was principal investigator and first author on the study.

CINV also appeared to be more prevalent in patients under 50 years of age and among those who were suffering from gastroesophageal reflux disease, a digestive disorder, added Bourdeanu, who presented the study at the 2010 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Luu said further studies are needed, but the data suggest that health-care professionals should consider individual risk profiles and tailor their therapy to ensure the best outcomes.

Thehang Luu, left, and Laura Bourdeanu

Researchers are applying the modern-day tools of science to understand how herbal remedies may stave off disease.

One traditional remedy under investigation is the root of the Baikal skullcap, a plant also known as huáng qín.

Chinese herbologists traditionally use the root to treat a number of problems including stroke and heart disease. A research team led by Wei Wen, Ph.D., assistant research professor in City of Hope’s Department of Molecular Medicine, recently studied the molecular effects of the root and its chief component, baicalin.

The researchers exposed both normal and cancerous cells to root extract and pure baicalin. They found the cells produced higher levels of the protein vascular endothelial growth factor, or VEGF.

VEGF promotes blood vessel formation; it is also the target of several drugs that aim to choke off the blood supply to tumors.

Wen hopes that baicalin might be useful for treating heart disease, stroke and other cardiovascular diseases. She remains cautious, however, since the study also suggests the compound could be harmful for some cancer patients as it could stimulate growth of vessels that supply blood to tumors.

Baikal skullcap