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Oncology
15th Jan, 2026
The Lancet
HPV-associated oropharyngeal carcinoma has a distinct biology and responds favourably to primary radiation (and surgery)-based treatments. The long-term survival benefit is, however, offset by chronic detrimental impact on health-related quality of life for cancer survivors due to treatment-related toxic effects such as dysphagia and xerostomia. Consequently, many toxicity-mitigating de-escalation methods are being explored for HPV-associated oropharyngeal carcinoma.1 Minimally invasive primary transoral surgery followed by de-intensification of post-operative (chemo) radiation depending on pathological risk assessment is one such investigational approach.
Guidelines for managing deleterious symptoms from cancer and its treatments have been largely underused in practice. To address this problem, the National Cancer Institute launched the Improving the Management of Symptoms During and Following Cancer Treatment (IMPACT) consortium,1 an alliance of three research centres leading large-scale trials of electronic patient-reported outcome measure (ePROM) symptom surveillance and management systems. Andrea L Cheville and colleagues2 report findings from one IMPACT trial, showing positive effects of an enhanced, electronic health record (EHR)-facilitated cancer symptom control (E2C2) intervention on patients' and survivors' symptom burden and health-care use.
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) remains among the deadliest cancers globally, primarily because symptoms typically appear at a late stage, resulting in diagnosis when curative treatment is no longer possible. Furthermore, detection of PDAC and other periampullary cancers on CT scans is challenging and requires specialised radiological expertise. However, even experienced radiologists miss early-stage tumours on CT scans; in a 2023 study, 15 expert radiologists achieved an average sensitivity of just 79·6% when reading contrast-enhanced CTs for PDAC.
SKYSCRAPER-08, a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase 3 trial, marks a milestone in the treatment of oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma.1 Patients were randomly assigned to receive tiragolumab (a TIGIT inhibitor) plus atezolizumab (a PD-L1 inhibitor) and chemotherapy (paclitaxel and cisplatin) or to receive placebo and chemotherapy. Median progression-free survival was 6·2 months (95% CI 5·7–7·2) with tiragolumab plus atezolizumab versus 5·4 months (4·4–5·5) without (hazard ratio [HR] 0·56, 95% CI 0·45–0·70; p<0·0001), whereas median overall survival was 15·7 months (95% CI 13·3–20·4) versus 11·1 months (9·6–13·6; HR 0·70, 95% CI 0·55–0·88; p=0·0024).
In The Lancet Oncology, Giacomo Montagna and colleagues1 report the results of the large international retrospective OPBC-07/microNAC study, comparing the oncological outcomes and 3-year axillary recurrence rate for 1585 patients with breast cancer and residual micrometastases at axillary staging after neoadjuvant chemotherapy with and without completion axillary lymph node dissection (ALND). The feasibility and safety of axillary surgery de-escalation in patients with breast cancer who are at high risk of arm morbidity after ALND is an important clinical question.
The PORTEC-4a trial1 provides, to the best of our knowledge, the first prospective, randomised evidence that a molecular integrated risk profile can safely guide adjuvant therapy decisions in high-intermediate risk endometrial cancer, reinforcing the rationale for incorporating molecular classification into clinical practice. According to Anne Sophie V M van den Heerik and colleagues’ findings in the Lancet Oncology,2 a refined molecular stratification supports a more tailored adjuvant treatment, enabling either de-escalation or intensification of radiotherapy based on individual tumour biology.
Reductions in development assistance funding by previous major donors—the USA, the UK, France, and Germany—have led to substantial challenges to global HIV control in 2025. Against this stark backdrop, World AIDS Day 2025 was commemorated globally on Dec 1, 2025. UNAIDS released a report ahead of the day detailing the impact of the unprecedented changing international aid landscape on global HIV control programmes worldwide, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries. Failure to meet the 2030 global HIV targets could result in an additional 3·3 million new HIV infections between 2025 and 2030, according to the report.
Planetary Health
23rd Dec, 2025
Food systems underpin human health, livelihoods, and environmental sustainability; yet, they remain major contributors to climate change, biodiversity loss, and inequity. Building on the 2025 EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems, a special collection of papers in The Lancet Planetary Health highlights emerging frontiers for research and modelling. Across models, dietary change remains the most effective lever for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and land-use pressure from food production, although affordability and nutritional adequacy challenges persist, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries.
Energy security, defined as the availability of reliable, clean, and sustainable energy necessary to ensure the continuous operation of health-care facilities, is essential for delivering safe and effective health care. Yet, it is rarely measured, financed, or governed as a component of core health infrastructure. Evidence from nearly a thousand hospitals shows that power outages were common, especially in lower-income settings, disrupting surgery, diagnostics, cold chains, and digital records, with reports of direct patient harm and environmental costs.
Physical inactivity and sedentary lifestyles are now accepted as major contributors to metabolic harm and disorder in the 21st century. These harms are frequently framed as a result of individual choices, with solutions leaning into personal responsibility. There are, however, crucial structural influences on individuals’ capacity to engage with so-called lifestyle advice. In particular, the way in which structural environments influence labour, lives, and communities can present several barriers to exercise and physical activity.
Food education in schools is increasingly being adopted as one of the key policy levers to support the shift towards healthier and more sustainable food practices worldwide. However, the way in which food education is designed and implemented is not often conducive to such goals. We propose a food learning model and process for designing holistic food education that fosters food competent children and adolescents as catalysts for change. The model applies evidence-based core principles required for effective food education, such as action-oriented goals that align with a student's contexts, co-ownership of the learning process, prioritising experiential learning, ensuring purposeful interactions, complementarity with the school food environment and beyond, and meaningful involvement of actors that influence children's food practices and perspectives.
Greenspace can promote health via diverse pathways. A common approach to assessing greenspace exposure is to estimate vegetation availability within buffers surrounding locations where people reside or spend time. However, no clear framework for informed buffer selection exists, and choices made show considerable heterogeneity, impeding evidence synthesis and causal inference. In this Personal View conducted by an interdisciplinary panel of experts, we aimed to establish a framework for informed buffer selection for epidemiological studies on greenspace.
Approximately 418 million children are beneficiaries of school meal programmes globally. In general, supportive infrastructure is necessary for the successful delivery of school meals, but in many low-income and lower-middle-income countries (LLMICs), schools have poor access to essential facilities such as kitchens, electricity, and clean water. Moreover, schools in LLMICs often rely on charcoal or firewood for cooking with consequent negative health, social, economic, and environmental impacts that disproportionally affect women and children.
The global shift away from healthy, diverse, and sustainable diets threatens children’s health and futures. Although school gardens and home-grown school feeding can reconnect children with nutritious, sustainably produced food, these interventions are often implemented separately and with little attention to agrobiodiversity, which is a cornerstone for sustainability and healthy diets. Via a scoping review of 124 articles from 35 countries, we identified wide-ranging and complementary benefits of these interventions beyond health and education.
Advising more sustainable treatment options for low severity scenarios generally does not affect patients’ trust in care, including when sustainability is mentioned explicitly. For high severity scenarios, advising more sustainable treatment options might negatively affect patients’ trust; however, the size and presence of the observed effect varied across medical problems.
What's New: Drugs
8th Apr, 2026
FDA
What's New: Vaccines, Blood and Biologics
Center,
Research
7th Apr, 2026
