2017 – Page 4 – Oral Cancer News

B.C. to begin providing free HPV vaccines for Grade 6 boys

Source: ctvnews.ca Author: Darcy Matheson Date: September 26, 2017 For the first time in British Columbia, boys in Grade 6 will be receiving free vaccinations for the Human Papillomavirus. HPV is one of the most commonly sexually transmitted infections and B.C. health authorities say three out of four sexually active people will get it at some point in their lives. Often showing no physical symptoms, HPV can lead to cervical, vaginal, and vulvar cancers in women and penile cancer in men – and can also cause anal and throat cancer in both men and women. Up until now, the vaccine to protect against HPV was only provided free to girls in Grade 6, with the assumption that boys would be indirectly protected through “herd immunity.” Vancouver Coastal Health will soon be sending out letters to parents and caregivers through children's schools regarding upcoming clinics for both girls and boys. People can also be immunized through health-care providers, family doctors and local public health units. Dr. Meena Dawar, medical health officer for Vancouver Coastal Health, said that immunizations are key because the symptom-less virus is often passed onto others without knowing it. “Most often an HPV infection will clear on its own but sometimes HPV won’t go away and cells infected with the virus can become cancerous," Dawar said in a statement. Cancer survivor Sandy Yun had her 14-year-old daughter immunized as part of the B.C. program. She was going to pay for her 11-year-old son to get the vaccine but now she [...]

Charlotte Parker2017-10-29T20:12:48-07:00September, 2017|Oral Cancer News|

Treatment That’s Easy to Swallow in HPV+ Throat Cancer

Source: Medscape.com Author: Nick Mulcahy Date: September 27, 2017 SAN DIEGO, California ― Daniel Ma, MD, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, treats a lot of relatively young patients with human papillomavirus (HPV)-related oropharyngeal cancers who are cured by various standard combinations of surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy and then have "another 30 to 40 years of life ahead of them." But that life expectancy can be marred by the "potentially life-altering side effects" of standard treatment, including dry mouth, loss of taste, and, in about one half of patients, difficulty swallowing, he said. These patients inspired the genesis of Dr. Ma's phase 2 study of an "aggressive dose de-escalation" of adjuvant radiation in this setting, he said. The investigators evaluated experimental radiation doses of 30 to 36 Gy, which is a 50% reduction from the current standard of 60 to 66 Gy. At a median of 2 years' follow-up among 80 patients, the treatment de-escalation has resulted in locoregional control rates comparable to historical controls, low toxicity, and, perhaps most notably, no decrement in swallowing function or quality of life, Dr. Ma reported here at the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) 2016 Annual Meeting. The toxicity and swallowing results are "the most exciting data," Dr. Ma told a standing-room-only crowd at a meeting session today. "It's the first clinical trial in head and neck cancer to demonstrate no injury to swallowing function after radiation," he told Medscape Medical News. In other words, patients' ability to swallow was no [...]

Charlotte Parker2017-10-29T20:12:22-07:00September, 2017|Oral Cancer News|

Halving radiation therapy for HPV-related throat cancer offers fewer side effects, similar outcomes

Source: www.eurekalert.org Author: Mayo Clinic press release Mayo Clinic researchers have found that a 50 percent reduction in the intensity and dose of radiation therapy for patients with HPV-related throat cancer reduced side effects with no loss in survival and no decrease in cure rates. Results of a phase II study were presented today at the 59th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology in San Diego by Daniel Ma, M.D. a radiation oncologist at Mayo Clinic. "A common approach for treating HPV-related throat cancer is a combination of surgery followed by daily radiation therapy for six to 6½ weeks," says Dr. Ma. "However, the radiation treatment can cause a high degree of side effects, including altered taste, difficulty swallowing, dry mouth, stiff neck and damage to the jaw bone." Dr. Ma says that patients with HPV-related throat cancer tend to be young and, once treated, are likely to live a long time with possibly life-altering side effects from the standard treatment. "The goal of our trial was to see if an aggressive reduction of radiation therapy (two weeks of radiation twice daily) could maintain excellent cure rates, while significantly reducing posttreatment side effects, improving quality of life and lowering treatment costs." Researchers followed 80 patients with HPV-related oropharyngeal squamous cell cancer with no evidence of residual disease following surgery and a smoking history of 10 or fewer pack years. That's the number of years smoking multiplied by the average packs of cigarettes smoked per day. At two [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2017-09-26T07:17:21-07:00September, 2017|Oral Cancer News|

This Man Tried An ‘Alternative’ Cancer Treatment—and Ended Up Poisoning Himself

Source: Menshealth.com Author: Alisa Hrustic Date: September 12, 2017 Being diagnosed with cancer is one of the scariest things that can happen to you, but what follows can be even scarier. Treatment for the disease is expensive, painful, and extensive, so it’s not uncommon for people to ponder alternative solutions. That’s all well and good, as long as it’s approved by your doctor. As for taking medicine into your own hands? That’s not always the best idea, since some alternative treatments can be extremely dangerous. Just recently, one Australian man learned that the hard way, according to a recent case report published in the British Medical Journal. The 67-year-old man—who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had gone into remission—consumed homemade apricot kernel extract daily for five years, since it’s typically marketed as a preventive medicine for cancer. He was also taking a fruit kernel supplement called Novodalin. While he was undergoing a routine surgery, his doctors noticed that his oxygen levels had severely dropped while he was under anesthesia, leading to a condition known as hypoxia, which can be deadly. Once they performed blood tests on the patient, the doctors concluded that his blood contained 25 times the accepted level of cyanide, a potentially deadly chemical, according to the report. That’s because apricot kernels contain amygdalin, also known as laetrile. Amygladin is a known cyanogenic glycoside, meaning it’s processed and converted into cyanide in your body, according to the Food and Drug Administration. While laetrile has been talked up for its anticancer properties, no human studies have [...]

Charlotte Parker2017-10-29T20:12:07-07:00September, 2017|Oral Cancer News|

Alcohol industry ‘playing down’ risk of cancer by using tobacco industry tactics

Source: news.sky.com Author: Paul Kelso, Health Correspondent The alcohol industry is misleading the public by downplaying the risk of cancer through similar tactics to the tobacco industry, researchers say. Liquor bottles in grocery store A study led by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and Sweden's Karolinska Institutet found the industry is using "denying, distortion and distraction" strategies to minimise evidence. Researchers analysed information relating to cancer on the websites and documents of 28 alcohol industry organisations between September and December last year, finding that most showed "some sort of distortion or misrepresentation" of evidence. The industry most commonly presented the relationship between alcohol and cancer as highly complex, implying there was no evidence of a consistent or independent link, according to the study. Other tactics included denying that any relationship existed or claiming that there was no risk for light or moderate drinking, as well as presenting alcohol as just one risk among many. Alcohol consumption is an established risk factor for a range of cancers, including oral cavity, liver, breast and colorectal cancers, and accounts for about 4% of new cancer cases annually in the UK. The latest British government advice on alcohol, issued last year, makes an explicit link between cancer and alcohol. It states: "The risk of developing a range of health problems (including cancers of the mouth, throat and breast) increases the more you drink on a regular basis." During the consultation phase the alcohol industry challenged the link with cancer. [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2017-09-08T11:53:23-07:00September, 2017|Oral Cancer News|

What’s next after creating a cancer-prevention vaccine?

Source: www.scientificamerican.com Author: Dina Fine Maron A winner of this year’s Lasker Awards talks about his work with HPV Imagine a vaccine that protects against more than a half-dozen types of cancer—and has a decade of data and experience behind it. We have one. It’s the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, and it was approved for the U.S. market back in June 2006. It can prevent almost all cervical cancers and protect against cancers of the mouth, throat and anus. It also combats the sexually transmitted genital warts that some forms of the virus can cause. On Wednesday, two researchers who completed fundamental work on these vaccines received one of this year’s prestigious Lasker Awards, a group of medical prizes sometimes called the “American Nobels.” Douglas Lowy and John Schiller, whose research provided the basis for the HPV vaccine, were selected alongside a researcher who separately unraveled key aspects of metabolic control of cell growth. Planned Parenthood was also given an award, for its public service. Lowy and Schiller, who both work at the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI), received the Lasker for their research on animal and human papillomaviruses—work that enabled the development of a vaccine against HPV-16 type, a form of the virus that fuels many HPV malignancies. The duo’s experiments proved that the vaccine is effective in animals, and they also conducted the first clinical trial of an HPV-16 vaccine in humans. That gave pharmaceutical companies the evidence they needed to invest in their own vaccines designed to [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2017-09-06T08:08:49-07:00September, 2017|Oral Cancer News|

Personalised cancer treatment

Source: medicalxpress.com Author: University of Oslo In Norway, more and more people are being affected by cancer of the mouth and throat. In recent years, the incidence has increased but the mortality has remained the same. Cisplatin is one of the most commonly administered cytostatics for this patient group. At the start of treatment, the drug works well. Gradually, though, most patients experience that the tumour develops resistance against this drug and the prognosis for survival then becomes very poor. In her PhD thesis, Jian Gao wanted to find out how the cancer cells could protect themselves against this cytostatic i.e. what is the underlying mechanism of resistance. She therefore cultured various cancer cell lines derived from oral cavity which were given differing doses of the cytostatic cisplatin. A cancer cell line is cultured from patients' cancerous tumours and can live indefinitely in the laboratory. These types of cell lines are used to examine the biology and the changes that have resulted in the development of cancer. Because the cancer cell lines divide in the laboratory, they can also adapt to new growth conditions, for example by becoming resistant to the cytostatic cisplatin in the same way as the cancer tissue in the patients. "First, I had to find those cancer cells that were sensitive to the cytostatic," explains Jian Gao. By identifying the sensitive cancer cell lines that I could make resistant in the laboratory, I could then study which changes took place in the cells as they changed [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2017-09-04T14:06:02-07:00September, 2017|Oral Cancer News|

Why HPV Vaccination Rates Remain Low in Rural States

Source: TechnologyReview.com Author: Emily Mullin Date: September 1, 2017 Mandi Price never thought she’d be diagnosed with cancer at age 24. She was a healthy college student finishing her senior year when, during a regular Pap smear, her gynecologist found abnormal cells in her cervix. It was stage II cervical cancer. Even more devastating was the fact that her cancer was preventable. Doctors detected a strain of human papillomavirus, the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S., in Price’s cancer cells. That strain of HPV is targeted by a vaccine called Gardasil. But Price never got the vaccine. Her primary care doctor didn’t recommend it when she was a teenager growing up in Washington state. Had she received it before becoming infected with HPV, she wouldn’t have gotten cancer. Price dropped out of her classes to get treatment. She needed surgery to remove the tumor from her cervix, then underwent chemotherapy and radiation to kill any remaining cancerous tissue. At her one-year follow-up appointment, doctors found that the cancer had spread. She endured chemotherapy for another six months. Now, at 29, Price is in remission and is working in Los Angeles. “Most of my 20s comprised being in a hospital. It was isolating,” she says. Merck’s Gardasil vaccine was considered a breakthrough when it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in June 2006. It was the first vaccine to protect against several cancers. But more than a decade after the vaccine came out, vaccination rates [...]

Charlotte Parker2017-10-29T20:13:32-07:00September, 2017|Oral Cancer News|

FDA Approves First Gene Therapy For Leukemia

Source: npr.org Author: Rob Stein Date: August 30, 2017 The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday announced what the agency calls a "historic action" — the first approval of a cell-based gene therapy in the United States. The FDA approved Kymriah, which scientists refer to as a "living drug" because it involves using genetically modified immune cells from patients to attack their cancer. The drug was approved to treat children and young adults up to age 25 suffering from a form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia who do not respond to standard treatment or have suffered relapses. The disease is a cancer of blood and bone marrow that is the most common childhood cancer in the United States. About 3,100 patients who are 20 and younger are diagnosed with ALL each year. "We're entering a new frontier in medical innovation with the ability to reprogram a patient's own cells to attack a deadly cancer," FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a written statement. "New technologies such as gene and cell therapies hold out the potential to transform medicine and create an inflection point in our ability to treat and even cure many intractable illnesses," Gottlieb said. The treatment involves removing immune system cells known as T cells from each patient and genetically modifying the cells in the laboratory to attack and kill leukemia cells. The genetically modified cells are then infused back into patients. It's also known as CAR-T cell therapy. "Kymriah is a first-of-its-kind treatment approach that fills an important [...]

Charlotte Parker2017-08-31T15:18:44-07:00August, 2017|Oral Cancer News|

More U.S. Teens Getting Vaccinated Against HPV

Source: http://health.usnews.com Date: 8/24/17 THURSDAY, Aug. 24, 2017 (HealthDay News) -- Six out of 10 U.S. parents are choosing to get their children vaccinated against the cancer-causing human papillomavirus (HPV), which is spread by sexual contact, federal health officials reported Thursday. The bad news: while most children are getting their first dose of HPV vaccine, many aren't completing the full vaccination schedule, the officials said. "I'm pleased with the progress, but too many teens are still not receiving the HPV vaccine -- which leaves them vulnerable to cancers caused by HPV infection," CDC director Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald said in an agency news release. "We need to do more to increase the vaccination rate and protect American youth today from future cancers tomorrow." An estimated 14 million Americans, including teens, become infected with HPV each year. The infection can cause cervical, vaginal and vulvar cancers in women, and penile cancer in men. It can also cause anal cancer, throat cancer and genital warts in both men and women, according to the CDC. The CDC recommends two doses of HPV vaccine for children at ages 11 or 12. Teens who get the first vaccine dose before their 15th birthday need two doses to be protected. Teens and young adults who start the vaccine series between ages 15 through 26 need three doses, according to the agency. In its new report, the CDC said 60 percent of teens aged 13 to 17 received one or more doses of HPV vaccine in 2016 -- [...]

Charlotte Parker2017-10-29T20:13:46-07:00August, 2017|Oral Cancer News|