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ALK Ready: Clinical Readiness & Support: Module 2 Early Recognition of Neurocognitive and Functional Adverse Events

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Description

Funding Disclosure

This educational activity is supported by an independent educational grant from Pfizer. Pfizer was not involved in the development of content or selection of faculty for this educational activity.

This is Module 2 of a Three-part expert roundtable discussion. Module 1 and Module 3 are accessible here.

Activity Description

In this second module, Dr Urs Weber and Dr Kyle Concannon will focus on the early recognition and proactive management of adverse events associated with targeted therapies. The session will highlight practical approaches to identifying subtle neurocognitive and functional changes, incorporating care partner observations, and conducting timely clinical assessment to distinguish treatment-related toxicities from oncologic or medical emergencies. Faculty will also discuss evidence-based strategies for adverse event mitigation, including supportive care, treatment interruptions, and dose modifications to maintain patient safety while preserving treatment benefit.

Prefer to read instead? Read our Key Clinical Summary here

Target Audience

This activity has been designed to meet the educational needs of Multidisciplinary team members involved in ALK-positive NSCLC care

Faculty Disclosure Statement / Conflict of Interest

Disclosures are made in accordance with ACCME standards to ensure transparency and objectivity in continuing education.

Faculty

Kyle Concannon, MD

Dr. Concannon is Assistant Professor of Medical Oncology at the University of Colorado. His laboratory research focuses on overcoming treatment resistance in oncogene-driven lung cancers. Dr. Concannon collaborates with multidisciplinary teams to provide individualized care aimed at improving survival and quality of life. He also actively supports the cancer community as a co-host of the Cracking Cancer podcast

Kyle Concannon, MD, has disclosed financial interests or relationships within the past 24 months with the following ineligible companies:

Consultant for AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim

Kyle Concannon, MD, does not intend to reference any unlabeled or unapproved uses of products during the presentation

Urs Weber, MD

Dr. Weber is an Assistant Professor of Thoracic Oncology at the Medical University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. He earned his MD from the Yale University School of Medicine and holds board certifications in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology. His clinical and research work focuses on thoracic oncology, with a specialization in cancer therapeutics and patient outcomes.

Urs Weber, MD, has disclosed financial interests or relationships within the past 24 months with the following ineligible companies:

Consultant for Boehringer Ingelheim, BlossomHill, EMD Serono and Johnson & Johnson

Urs Weber, MD, does not intend to reference any unlabeled or unapproved uses of products during the presentation

Staff

CCI staff, MedAll staff, and all planners and reviewers have no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies to disclose.

Accreditation

This continuing education activity will be provided by Current Concepts Institute (CCI) and MedAll. Physicians, Nurse Practitioners, and Physician Assistants will be eligible for AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™; Nurses for ANCC Contact Hours. A statement of participation is available for other healthcare professionals.

Physicians

AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™ are available for this activity.

This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of Current Concepts Institute and MedAll Education. Current Concepts Institute is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

Current Concepts Institute designates this online activity a maximum of 0.25 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Other Professionals

All other health care professionals completing this continuing education activity will be issued a statement of participation indicating the number of hours of continuing education credit. This may be used for professional education CE credit. Please consult your accrediting organization or licensing board for their acceptance of this CE activity.

Participation Costs

There is no cost to participate in this program.

Requirements for Completion

In order to receive credit for this activity, participants must review the content and complete the post-test and evaluation form. Statements of credit are awarded upon successful completion of the post-test and evaluation form.

Launch and Expiration Date: 6 August 2026 – 30 January 2028

Estimated time to complete this activity: 15 minutes

System Requirements

Mobile device (e.g., large-format smart phone; laptop or tablet computer) or desktop computer with a video display of at least 1024 × 768 pixels at 24-bit color depth, capable of connecting to the Internet at broadband or faster speeds, with a current version Internet browser and popular document viewing software (e.g., Microsoft Office, PDF viewer, image viewer) installed. Support for streaming or downloadable audio-visual materials (e.g., streaming MP4, MP3 audio) in hardware and software may be required to view, review, or participate in portions of the program.

Unapproved and/or off-label use disclosure

Current Concepts Institute/MedAll requires CE faculty to disclose to the participants:

1. When products or procedures being discussed are off-label, unlabelled, experimental, and/or investigational (not US Food and Drug Administration [FDA] approved); and

2. Any limitations on the information presented, such as data that are preliminary or that represent ongoing research, interim analyses, and/or unsupported opinion.

Disclaimer

This activity is intended for educational purposes only and does not establish a standard of care or replace clinical judgment. Any therapeutic or diagnostic strategies discussed must be evaluated in the context of each patient’s clinical circumstances, risks, and current evidence.

Learners should consult authoritative clinical guidelines and approved product information when considering treatment decisions.

All materials are used with permission. The views expressed are those of the faculty and do not necessarily reflect those of the accredited providers, MedAll, or any supporters.

Content is accurate as of the date of release.

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Computer generated transcript

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The following transcript was generated automatically from the content and has not been checked or corrected manually.

We're now going to move on to talking about specifically neurocognitive and functional adverse events and how to recognize these early. From a clinician perspective, here are some general principles for monitoring and managing AE's associated with. Lurlatnib You want to prepare the patient and their caregiver for What's to come. We discussed this earlier, you want to review the most common side effects and give some indication of when we might expect these side effects to occur. With lorlatinib, as with our other ALECTKIs and actually many of our TKIs that we use in lung cancer, side effects tend to come on fairly quickly. Um, I usually see most of the side effects within days to weeks. And so, I think it's important for, for patients to know that. Um, We want to understand, you know, do they have any of the side effects that we might expect to see at baseline. So Maria, for example, already had some peripheral neuropathy at baseline. We can certainly see new or worsening peripheral neuropathy with drugs like lorlatinib. And so understanding, you know, where the baseline is, is important to assessing whether these things are, are worsening on treatment. Um, and so, with any of these adverse effects, we wanna understand how are they affecting the patient, you know, in the case of Mild liver enzyme elevations, that's not gonna be affecting the patient in their day to day life. Something we wanna keep an eye on, but it's not something that is, is going to impact that patient. Neurocognitive changes or peripheral neuropathy on the other hand, can be very impactful and limiting in patients' day to day lives, so we want to understand how, how that's happening. And second, is it affecting, affecting their ability to function on a day to day basis. So in terms of managing these side effects, you know, if they're not really affecting the patient in their day to day lives, we can think about mitigation strategies or we can just monitor, as with the liver enzymes, for example. If they are moderately or severely affecting patients in their day to day lives, we want to think about making some changes to the treatment. Do we interrupt, um, treatment? Do we reduce doses of treatment, um. With most therapies, including the 3rd generation AC inhibitor lolatinib, in fact, dose interruptions, dose reductions can be very, very effective in mitigating some of these side effects. As I alluded to earlier, I will often even start these patients on a lower dose of lolotinib because we see significantly less side effects at the lower doses, and we still see good efficacy even with 50 mg or 75 mg as opposed to the label dose of 100 mg. And then it's important anytime we make any of these changes to reassess and make sure that the changes we made had the effect that we wanted to see, um, and if they didn't, that we make additional changes. Again, from a clinician perspective, how do we recognize cognitive and mood changes? This, this can be very challenging, um, especially in some of our older patients who are already coming into treatment with maybe some mild cognitive impairment. It's really important to get a good assessment at baseline. And then to kind of follow longitudinally and be on the lookout for changes. So symptoms that we can ask about and document if they're present or not are things like forgetfulness, word finding difficulty, decreased attention concentration, sleep changes, irritability, apathy, and mood swings. And I'll highlight here that it's obviously important to ask the patients about these things, but these are, these are symptoms that often the people around them will notice before the patients do. And so talking to the caregivers and, and, and the folks who are with the patient about these symptoms can also be really helpful in kind of getting a sense of whether they're happening or not. We also want to talk about their functional status, you know, are they making mistakes at work? Are they getting lost, are we needing reminders to, to do tasks, as these can kind of be indicators of some of these neurologic symptoms. And then again, asking the caregiver, you know, incorporating the kind of insight of the people around the patient to, to get a sense of whether these things are happening. And what do we do once, once we Identify some of these symptoms, and doing a rapid assessment either in person or over the phone if these are being reported from home. We can ask simple orientation questions, name, date, location, um, simple attention tasks like counting backwards or reciting the months backwards, item recall, um, and doing a functional screen, asking about their ability to do things like take their medication or, or work. Um. Things that are really concerning to hear about are, are really acute changes like new onset confusion, hallucinations, obviously seizures, um. Acute personality changes, any sort of focal neurologic deficits, um, Inability to perform um activities that we're usually able to perform. I think if we're, if we're hearing about any of these acute changes, the first thing we, we obviously wanna make sure is that we're not missing an acute neurologic event, um, you know, like a stroke or a seizure or something like that. So, if patients are reporting these sort of acute changes, I think those, those are triggers to get a patient evaluated, um, you know, preferably in a, in an urgent or emergent care setting to, to make sure they're not having a stroke, to make sure they're not having seizures, um, get neurology involved to, to kind of help rule those things out. If we're able to rule those things out, then, and then I think, you know, we can reasonably ascribe these, these side effects of, of your treatment, and then, You know, think about how to address that. Um, like I alluded to before with Most of our TKIs, including VA TKIs, including Llonib. Dose holds, dose reductions are very, very effective in addressing some of these toxicities. So if someone's having this kind of, you know, acute severe change in their neurologic status, um, and we sort of rule out all the, all the other dangerous things, um, I would advocate to, you know, hold the drug for at least a few days, kind of let them get back to their baseline, and then resume treatment at a lower dose. Again, you know, from a clinician perspective, we want to make sure that we're, you know, not missing any acute medical event before we ascribe these neurologic effects to A side effect of, of their treatment, we, you know, wanna get vitals, we wanna check their blood sugar, make sure we haven't started any other new medications or supplements that might be interacting with their treatment, getting labs, um, and then, you know, getting CNS imaging, um, again, hopefully, in sort of an emergent fashion in Um, in conjunction with, with input from, from a neurologist so that we're evaluating for all the right things, like, you know, like stroke, like, um, progressive cancer of the brain, all those sorts of things. In terms of a team, you know, we want to make sure that we're documenting our conversations with the patient, documenting the neurologic status. It's really important, um, so that everyone kind of has a sense of the timeline of things, getting the oncologist involved to, to make decisions about holding treatment or changing the dose. Again, with, with some of these acute changes, getting them evaluated quickly by other consultants, neurology, um, and then involving pharmacy as well to make sure that, you know, if they're starting any new treatments or, or supplements or anything like that, that we, that we're not dealing with any sort of significant drug-drug interaction. And then again, just documenting everything very clearly, documenting timeline so that as more people are getting involved, everyone kind of has a clear sense of, of the timeline. For patients and their care partners, you know, I think it's important to counsel them about monitoring for some of these neurocognitive changes, you know, for care partners, especially for being mindful, being cognizant of, of what their loved one is doing, if they're, you know, acting differently, speaking differently, um, sleeping more, having mood changes, having falls, that they are sort of on the lookout for these things, and, um, And reporting them to us, and we can also prompt. You know, patients to, patients and their caregivers to keep track of these things in, in a diary or, or something of the sorts, kind of prompting them with questions about memory, about confusion, about sleep. Um, and then, you know, asking for concrete examples of, of things that care partners have observed to kind of get a sense of, of what kind of deficits patients might be experiencing. All right. Um, we're gonna move into our question and answer session here. We're gonna start with this one here. How soon should we hold a 3rd generation AKA inhibitor for neurocognitive symptoms and when can we safely rechallenge? I think what else