Survivorship-focused content at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 2022-2024 annual meetings.

Abstract

1671 Background: Survivorship is a core component of comprehensive cancer care yet its representation in major oncology scientific meetings remains unclear. This study systematically evaluated survivorship-focused content presented over three years at the ASCO Annual Meetings for prevalence, characteristics, and thematic patterns. Methods: All abstracts presented at the ASCO Annual Meeting from 2022-2024 were obtained (N=8,928). Abstracts containing the root word “survivor” (e.g., survivor, survivors, survivorship) in the title, text, or submission category “Symptoms and Survivorship” were identified using an automated data-extraction tool. Each extracted abstract underwent structured review to determine relevance to survivorship and then mapped to domains of the Quality of Cancer Survivorship Framework. Two independent reviewers evaluated each abstract, with discrepancies resolved by consensus. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize abstract content. Results: A total of 568 abstracts from 2022-2024 contained the root word “survivor” in the title, text or the submission category, representing 6.4% of all presented abstracts. Prevalence of survivorship-focused abstracts increased modestly from 2.2% in 2022 to 4.1% in 2024. Reviewers identified 63.8% of the extracted abstracts as relevant to the survivorship care framework and abstracts most frequently addressed the survivorship domains of physical effects (28.3%) and contextual factors (14.6%). Additional analyses examined cancer type and stage studied (36.6% mixed, 19.5% breast; 55.2% cancer stage not specified), survivorship stage (45% not specified, 19.3% in curative treatment), study design (65.9% observational), and healthcare setting (58.2%). Conclusions: Despite a rapidly growing population of cancer survivors, survivorship-focused content at the ASCO Annual Meeting remained largely static between 2022 and 2024, highlighting a gap between emerging survivorship needs and representation within oncology research programming. Further, abstracts frequently failed to specify the study population or context, or reference specific implications to survivorship domains. This study establishes a reproducible benchmark for monitoring survivorship content and provides a scalable methodology for ongoing surveillance of future meeting abstracts. The abstraction method may have excluded relevant survivorship-focused content. These findings could guide ASCO educational planning committees as they refine strategies to strengthen and advance survivorship-focused content in future meetings, ensuring alignment with the evolving needs of the survivor community.