Little is known about the knowledge and practices regarding early detection of cancer for Chinese women either living in their homelands or worldwide. The purpose of this exploratory study is to describe how cultural beliefs and understandings may influence participation in early detection programs for the increasing numbers of Chinese women who live in the United States. The Health Belief Model (HBM) emerged as a useful framework for categorizing data obtained in Mandarin from a qualitative study of married, educated Chinese women (n = 23; mean age 30.4 years) who attended a university clinic. Cultural beliefs about modesty, husband's involvement, self-care, relationship between health and body functions, and use of preventive health behaviors in the absence of illness influenced women's participation and supported the HBM. Early detection was not a clear concept for these women: 80% believed performing monthly breast self-examinations and 70% believed receiving annual Papanicolaou smears would prevent cancer.

The process development of a new synthetic route leading to an efficient and robust synthetic process for venetoclax (1: the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) in Venclexta) is described. The redesigned synthesis features a Buchwald-Hartwig amination to construct the core ester 23c in a convergent fashion by connecting two key building blocks (4c and 26), which is then followed by a uniquely effective saponification reaction of 23c using anhydrous hydroxide generated in situ to obtain 2. Finally, the coupling of the penultimate core acid 2 with sulfonamide 3 furnishes drug substance 1 with consistently high quality. The challenges and solutions for the key Pd-catalyzed C−N cross-coupling will also be discussed in detail. The improved synthesis overcomes many of the initial scale-up challenges and was accomplished in 46% overall yield from 3,3-dimethyldicyclohexanone (6), more than doubling the overall yield of the first generation route. The new process was successfully implemented for producing large quantities of 1 with >99% area purity.

The present study was conducted to establish the validity of the spiritual distress scale (SDS), a scale developed as part of a qualitative study in which 20 cancer patients were interviewed about spiritual needs in 2003-2004. The SDS has four domains: relationship with self, relationship with others, relationship with God, and attitude towards death A measurement study was conducted whereby 85 patients completed the SDS during their hospitalization in the oncology unit of a medical centre in southern Taiwan. The SDS, including four domains of sub-scales, was broader than other spiritual scales in the literature that only contained one or two domains and focused on the health area. The SDS has established the adequate content and construct validity. Further training of nurses for assessing spiritual distress of cancer patients using the SDS would be recommended for future study. The established content and construct validity of the SDS could be applied in oncology for nurses to assess spiritual distress of cancer patients.

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