Oral cancer sneaks up

Source: well.blogs.nytimes.com Author: Donald G. McNeail Jr. and Anahad O'Connor The actor Michael Douglas has done for throat cancer what Rock Hudson did for AIDS and Angelina Jolie did for prophylactic mastectomy. By asserting last week that his cancer was caused by a virus transmitted during oral sex, Mr. Douglas pushed the disease onto the front pages and made millions of Americans worry about it for the first time. In this case, it was a subset of Americans who normally worry more about being killed by cholesterol than by an S.T.D. The typical victim is a middle-aged, middle-class, married heterosexual white man who has had about six oral sex partners in his lifetime. The virus, human papillomavirus Type 16, also causes cervical cancer. So is there any early oral screening that a man can have — an equivalent to the Pap smear, which has nearly eliminated cervical cancer as a death threat in this country? The answer, according to cancer experts and a recent opinion from the United States Preventive Services Task Force, is no. And for surprising reasons. The Pap test — invented in 1928 by Dr. George N. Papanicolaou — involves scraping a few cells from the cervix and checking them under a microscope for precancerous changes. Precancerous cells have a “halo” around the nucleus, while cancerous ones have larger, more colorful nuclei, said Dr. Paul D. Blumenthal, a professor of gynecology at Stanford University Medical School. In theory, it should be similarly easy to scrape and examine [...]

New Breath Test to Identify Head and Neck Cancer

Source: British Journal of Cancer M Hakim, S Billan, U Tisch, G Peng, I Dvrokind, O Marom, R Abdah-Bortnyak, A Kuten and H Haick Abstract Background: Head-and-neck cancer (HNC) is the eighth most common malignancy worldwide. It is often diagnosed late due to a lack of screening methods and overall cure is achieved in <50% of patients. Head-and-neck cancer sufferers often develop a second primary tumour that can affect the entire aero-digestive tract, mostly HNC or lung cancer (LC), making lifelong follow-up necessary. Methods: Alveolar breath was collected from 87 volunteers (HNC and LC patients and healthy controls) in a cross-sectional clinical trial. The discriminative power of a tailor-made Nanoscale Artificial Nose (NA-NOSE) based on an array of five gold nanoparticle sensors was tested, using 62 breath samples. The NA-NOSE signals were analysed to detect statistically significant differences between the sub-populations using (i) principal component analysis with ANOVA and Student's t-test and (ii) support vector machines and cross-validation. The identification of NA-NOSE patterns was supported by comparative analysis of the chemical composition of the breath through gas chromatography in conjunction with mass spectrometry (GC–MS), using 40 breath samples. Results: The NA-NOSE could clearly distinguish between (i) HNC patients and healthy controls, (ii) LC patients and healthy controls, and (iii) HNC and LC patients. The GC–MS analysis showed statistically significant differences in the chemical composition of the breath of the three groups. Conclusion: The presented results could lead to the development of a cost-effective, fast, and reliable method for the differential [...]

Metabolic activity of head and neck cancer may help guide treatment

Source: www.oncologystat.com Author: Staff The metabolic activity of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma on pretreatment imaging independently predicts outcomes in patients who undergo intensity-modulated radiation therapy, new data show. This imaging information can be used to tailor treatment, especially to reduce the risk of distant metastases, lead investigator Dr. Min Yao said at a head and neck cancer symposium sponsored by the American Society for Radiation Oncology. Higher standardized uptake value (SUV) of the primary tumor and of the lymph nodes predicted worse outcomes in multivariate analyses presented by Dr. Yao, a radiation oncologist at the Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland. "Several papers have shown that the standardized uptake value (SUV) is a prognostic factor in head and neck cancer," Dr. Yao told attendees. Most of these studies were small series, involved patients receiving conventional radiation therapy, and did not evaluate SUV of the primary tumor and lymph nodes separately. Dr. Yao and his colleagues analyzed outcomes in 177 patients treated for head and neck squamous cell carcinoma with intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) between 1999 and 2006. The patients had a pretreatment positron emission tomography scan using fluorodeoxyglucose as the tracer (FDG-PET), and the maximal SUV was determined for both the primary tumor and the involved lymph nodes. The patients then underwent IMRT with curative intent. Seventy-seven percent of the patients were male. Twenty-nine percent were receiving IMRT postoperatively, whereas the rest were receiving it as definitive therapy. The cancer was most commonly located in the oropharynx (49%) and [...]

Metabolic activity of head and neck cancer may help guide treatment

Source: www.oncologystat.com Author: Staff The metabolic activity of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma on pretreatment imaging independently predicts outcomes in patients who undergo intensity-modulated radiation therapy, new data show. This imaging information can be used to tailor treatment, especially to reduce the risk of distant metastases, lead investigator Dr. Min Yao said at a head and neck cancer symposium sponsored by the American Society for Radiation Oncology. Higher standardized uptake value (SUV) of the primary tumor and of the lymph nodes predicted worse outcomes in multivariate analyses presented by Dr. Yao, a radiation oncologist at the Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland. "Several papers have shown that the standardized uptake value (SUV) is a prognostic factor in head and neck cancer," Dr. Yao told attendees. Most of these studies were small series, involved patients receiving conventional radiation therapy, and did not evaluate SUV of the primary tumor and lymph nodes separately. Dr. Yao and his colleagues analyzed outcomes in 177 patients treated for head and neck squamous cell carcinoma with intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) between 1999 and 2006. The patients had a pretreatment positron emission tomography scan using fluorodeoxyglucose as the tracer (FDG-PET), and the maximal SUV was determined for both the primary tumor and the involved lymph nodes. The patients then underwent IMRT with curative intent. Seventy-seven percent of the patients were male. Twenty-nine percent were receiving IMRT postoperatively, whereas the rest were receiving it as definitive therapy. The cancer was most commonly located in the oropharynx (49%) and [...]

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