The present study found culturally and contextually specific themes and sub-themes about positive emotional health, spiritual health and financial health.

Background: The impact and consequences of cancer on the patients and their family caregivers (FCs) are closely intertwined. Caregivers' burdens can be increased due to the patients' unmet needs and unresolved problems. Additionally, the caregivers' unmet needs may adversely affect their own well-being and the patients' health outcomes. This study aims to determine the palliative care needs and the factors associated with these needs in patients with advanced solid cancer and their FCs. Methods: In a cross-sectional survey, 599 patients with advanced solid tumours and 599 FCs were recruited from the largest ambulatory cancer centre and the inpatient ward of the largest hospital in Singapore. Determinants of patients' and FCs' needs were assessed by the Comprehensive Needs Assessment Tool (CNAT) and CNAT-C respectively. Clinical characteristics of patients were obtained from medical records. Results: The FCs (median age 51 years) were younger than the patients (median age 62 years), and were mostly female (62.6%) whereas the gender distribution of patients was quite balanced (49.2% male and 50.8% female). Both patients and FCs had "information" and "practical support" in their top three domains of palliative care needs. The second highest domain of needs was "psychological problems" (16.4 ± 21.5) in patients and "health-care staff" (23.4 ± 26.5) in FCs. The item that had the highest need score in "information" domain for both patients and FCs was "financial support for patients, either from government and/ or private organizations". Under clinical setting, the inpatients (19.2 ± 16.4) and their FCs (26.0 ± 19.0) tend to have higher needs than the outpatients (10.5 ± 12.1) and their FCs (14.7 ± 14.3). In terms of palliative care, higher total CNAT score was observed in both patients (16.6 ± 12.9 versus 13.3 ± 15.2) and their FCs (25.1 ± 18.6 versus 17.7 ± 16.7) who received palliative care. In terms of patients' KPS scores, patients with lower KPS scores tend to have higher needs. Conclusion: Overall, the findings confirm that patients with advanced cancer and their FCs have many palliative care needs irrespective of their clinical settings. Initiatives and interventions for the development of a comprehensive support system for both patients with advanced cancer and their FCs are warranted and can be derived from these findings.

Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are the commonest genetic variant in the human genome and have been associated with inter-individual differences in drug response. Finding the causative SNPs underlying variations in drug response has been a cornerstone of personalized medicine. However, as there are over 19 million SNPs, the task of finding causative SNPs underlying differences in drug response using in vitro and in vivo methods can be intimidating. SNP related web resources can be invaluable in the search for SNPs relevant to drug response phenotypes as they represent relatively cheaper yet efficient ways of prioritizing relevant SNPs for further study. These resources serve as repositories of SNP information or contain in silico tools that can predict the functionality of a SNP. More sophisticated resources integrate the information repository function with the predictive function to create a one stop SNP resource for researchers. SNP related web resources can also aid researchers in planning and analyzing different types of genetic association studies by aiding in selecting SNPs for genotyping in these studies. The focus of this mini review is to outline the SNP related web resources that are available to researchers and how these resources may aid researchers studying SNP-drug response phenotype associations. Through efficient utilization of SNP related web resources, researchers will hopefully be able accelerate the pace of SNP related research in pharmacogenomics by identifying high risk SNP variants contributing to drug response as well as developing novel therapeutic targets based on understanding how SNPs alter drug response pathways.

SNPs are known to contribute to variations in drug response and there are more than 14 million polymorphisms spanning the human genome. However, not all of these SNPs are functional. It would be impractical and costly to evaluate every individual SNP for functionality experimentally. Consequently, one of the major challenges for researchers has been to seek out functional SNPs from all the SNPs in the human genome. In silico or bioinformatic methods are economical, less labor intensive, yet powerful approaches to filter out potentially functional SNPs in drug-response genes for further study. This allows researchers to prioritize which SNPs to subsequently evaluate experimentally for drug-response studies, as well as potentially providing insights into possible mechanisms underlying how SNPs may affect drug-response genes.

With an increasing emphasis to encourage aging and dying in the community and more attention given to building up the home hospice industry's capacity and capability, it is important to understand the profile of the patients who have been utilizing home hospice services. This also helps to plan and develop similar services in other parts of the world.