11/18/2004 Amy Redwine Delta Democrat Times It is estimated by the American Cancer Society that more than 45 percent of Americans are smokers, which should make for an interesting public hearing tonight — and for some interesting moments Thursday during the annual Great American Smokeout. That's also one reason why Mississippi has joined in a new quit smoking initiative. Tonight's public hearing at 6 at the Greenville Higher Education Center will be to receive public input on whether downtown businesses should be smoke free. "We do need to hear all people, smokers and non-smokers, but if more people were educated on the dangers of smoking they would never start in the first place and they would try harder to quit," said Audine Haynes, director of the Washington County Anti-Drug Task Force Community Partnership. Haynes said people have told her that stopping smoking is harder that giving up harder drugs. Haynes said she supports the project because her father was a smoker and died from the effects of tobacco products. She said she has also seen her own husband who is, "very a strong-willed and strong-minded person," try to stop smoking with no success. Haynes says she wants people to stop smoking before they reach the state where they are unable to or to never start in the first place. Millions of smokers have used the American Center Society's Great American Smokeout to help them quit or reduce their tobacco use during its 28 years, says the Oregon Research Institute. However, [...]

11/18/2004 San Francisco, CA Dr. Dean Edell KGO-TV online Most of us rarely hear about oral cancer, yet it is the sixth most common cancer killer. It is so deadly because it is often detected too late. Dr. Dean Edell reports on a new light that may increase detection. Cathy is getting a dental checkup, but this is slightly more than routine. Sunnyvale dentist Dr. Paul Griffith is carefully screening Cathy for any early signs of oral cancer because her family history puts her at greater risk. Cathy Zander, dental patient: "My aunt had oral cancer and died of it. And several other people in my family have had cancer, even twice." Raymond is one of the lucky ones. Dr. Griffith picked up his cancer very early, both times. Raymond Fish, oral cancer patient: "The first cancer I had was 1994 - in mid '94 - and at that time they did surgery and then in 1996 it came back and in a different spot and at that time I had radiation therapy." Most of us brush and floss, and even go to the dentist regularly. But up to now, there hasn't been a simple way to detect oral cancer. So often it goes undetected until it has advanced and is far more dangerous. Paul Griffith, DDS, Sunnyvale dentist: "Oral cancer is a real problem because it's not well known. There's not a lot of discussion about it in the press. But 70 percent of the cancers are diagnosed very, [...]

11/18/2004 Amy Dockser Marcus Wall Street Journal Online All too often, the pain of a cancer diagnosis is compounded by the realization that the disease could have been caught sooner if only the early symptoms had been recognized. Indeed, for all the enormous strides in cancer-screening technologies, some very basic red flags -- back pain, constipation, fatigue, even a hoarse voice -- are often overlooked because they resemble the symptoms of benign diseases. Patients are unlikely to call a doctor right away, and when they do, doctors may spend months looking for other causes before suspecting cancer. But there is a growing recognition in the cancer community that identifying physical symptoms is vital. Existing screens still miss many tumors, and no effective screens even exist for some particularly lethal cancers, such as pancreatic and ovarian. As a result, a concerted effort is under way to educate patients, doctors and medical students to identify early symptoms of cancer. Diagnostic tools are also in the works that can help physicians put the pieces together and see when a particular constellation of symptoms may indicate cancer. A challenge in this, of course, is how to encourage patients and doctors to recognize symptoms without creating panic over every itch and twinge. Cramping and fatigue can be signs of colon cancer, but they could also signify less threatening digestive problems. Coughing and chest pain are early symptoms of lung cancer, but also of a bad cold. Pain in the abdomen or back can signal pancreatic [...]

11/16/2004 Amy Dockser Marcus SFGate.com All too often, the pain of a cancer diagnosis is compounded by the realization that the disease could have been caught sooner if only the early symptoms had been recognized. Indeed, for all the enormous strides in cancer-screening technologies, some very basic red flags -- back pain, constipation, fatigue, even a hoarse voice -- are often overlooked because they resemble the symptoms of benign diseases. Patients are unlikely to call a doctor right away, and when they do, doctors may spend months looking for other causes before suspecting cancer. But there is a growing recognition in the cancer community that identifying physical symptoms is vital. Existing screens still miss many tumors, and no effective screens even exist for some particularly lethal cancers, such as pancreatic and ovarian. As a result, a concerted effort is under way to educate patients, doctors and medical students to identify early symptoms of cancer. Diagnostic tools are also in the works that can help physicians put the pieces together and see when a particular constellation of symptoms may indicate cancer. A challenge in this, of course, is how to encourage patients and doctors to recognize symptoms without creating panic over every itch and twinge. Cramping and fatigue can be signs of colon cancer, but they could also signify less threatening digestive problems. Coughing and chest pain are early symptoms of lung cancer, but also of a bad cold. Pain in the abdomen or back can signal pancreatic cancer, but how [...]

11/16/2004 MC Haya-Fernandez, J Bagan, J Murillo-Cortes, R Poveda-Roda, and C Calabuig Oral Dis, November 1, 2004; 10(6): 346-8 Objectives: To determine the relationship between oral leukoplakia (OL) and oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC), and to evaluate possible differences between those carcinomas with and without associated leukoplakia. Material and methods: A total of 138 patients were studied at the Stomatology Service of the University General Hospital, Valencia, Spain. These patients were divided into two groups: group 1, patients with oral cancer and leukoplakia, and group 2, patients with OSCC but with no associated premalignant lesions. The relationship between this precancerous lesion and the OSCC was evaluated, as well as the possible clinical and histological differences between the tumours of the two groups. Results: Leukoplakia was detected in 27 (19.56%) patients with OSCC. No differences were found between the two groups regarding age and tumour location. However, statistically significant differences were observed with respect to the form, tumour stage and the presence of adenopathies in the cancers with and without leukoplakia; in that the tumours associated with leukoplakia were diagnosed as being at a more initial stage. Conclusions: Those patients with OL associated with oral cancer presented with tumours at a less advanced stage than those where no associated leukoplakia existed.

11/16/2004 Arlene A. Forastiere Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 96, No. 22, 1647-1649, November 17, 2004 Editorial The majority of deaths from locally advanced head and neck cancer are due to complications of uncontrolled locoregional disease, and this pattern of failure must be altered to improve patient survival. Over the past 25 years, thousands of patients with head and neck cancer have been enrolled in clinical trials to test whether the addition of platinum-based chemotherapy to local treatment modalities of surgery and radiotherapy improves overall survival. These studies have taken two approaches. In the first approach, several cycles of neoadjuvant or induction chemotherapy (most commonly cisplatin and infusional 5-fluorouracil) precede definitive locoregional therapy (i.e., surgery). The second approach is chemoradiotherapy, the concurrent administration of radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Of the two approaches, only chemoradiotherapy has succeeded in changing outcomes. Numerous phase III trials that have compared radiotherapy alone to chemoradiotherapy have shown that the latter statistically significantly improved locoregional control and that the magnitude of improvement is sufficient to have an impact on overall survival (1–5). As a consequence of these findings, over the last decade, chemoradiotherapy has become the standard of care for the management of unresectable head and neck cancers and nasopharyngeal cancers (i.e., stage T3, stage T4, or lymph node–positive cancers) and for the nonoperative management of locally advanced oropharyngeal cancers. By contrast, only two (6,7) of more than 30 randomized trials have demonstrated that induction chemotherapy confers a survival advantage. In addition, induction chemotherapy has [...]

11/16/2004 Laura McMahon Medical News Today The addition of neoadjuvant chemotherapy to concurrent chemoradiation may be a promising approach for treating patients with inoperable advanced head and neck cancer, according the authors of a 10-year follow-up of a randomized trial. In 1986, a randomized phase III trial began in which 237 patients with nonmetastatic stage III or IV head and neck squamous cell carcinoma were treated with either four cycles of neoadjuvant chemotherapy followed by locoregional treatment (surgery and radiotherapy or radiotherapy alone) or locoregional treatment alone. Two years after treatment began, there was no difference in survival between the two groups. In a follow-up at 5 and 10 years after treatment, Adriano Paccagnella, M.D., of SS Giovanni and Paolo Hospital in Venice, and colleagues report again that there was no difference in survival between the two groups. However, among patients who did not receive surgery because their tumors were inoperable, those who received neoadjuvant chemotherapy had a higher rate of survival than patients who did not receive chemotherapy. In an editorial, Arlene A. Forastiere, M.D., of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore, notes that these promising follow-up results bolster soon-to-be activated trials of chemoradiotherapy--the current standard of treatment for advanced head and neck cancer--with and without neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

11/16/2004 Renee Twombly EurekAlert.com Nowadays, a vial of blood taken by a family physician can sometimes forecast a person's risk of heart disease, and cholesterol-lowering drugs as well as a daily baby aspirin may be recommended to curb the threat. But in the future, a simple finger prick also may predict which cancers are destined to develop in an individual, years, even decades, down the road. And based on a person's unique genetics - the milieu of factors that repair DNA damage, or push cells to grow - the patient of tomorrow also may be given a recipe of drugs that will prevent or delay those cancers from ever developing. Their cocktail of cancer preventives might include refined forms of aspirin to prevent colon and breast cancer, trace minerals to protect against prostate cancer, or proven versions of ancient remedies, such as turmeric spice for breast cancer and good ole' cups of green tea daily, to repress oral cancer. At the moment, a complete "chemoprevention" strategy - the use of a natural or synthetic substance to reduce the risk of developing cancer - is a goal to be reached in the future. By all accounts, routine use of such agents won't be here for a long time because much more needs to be understood about the changes that push a cell to become cancerous before that process can be stalled or reversed. Still, more and more of the research effort at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center [...]

11/16/2004 Dr. Gifford-Jones CalgarySun.com "Stick out your tongue," my dentist invariably requests during my regular dental checkup. I know that shortly he'll examine my teeth. But for the moment he's looking for any sign of cancer of the tongue. Cancer of the tongue is one of the more common types of mouth cancer. It's curable in about 80% of cases when diagnosed early. Most tongue cancers are treated by surgery, which may include post-operative radiation and/or chemotherapy. Usually, however, treatment of advanced cancers of the tongue necessitate a radical surgical resection requiring some reconstruction of the tongue, a demanding eight-hour operation. And that's why I'm writing this particular column. I recently attended a meeting of head and neck surgeons to hear about new treatments for oral cancers. Several of Canada's most distinguished Professors of Head and Neck Surgery made this remark to me, 'I used to get more applications for training in head and neck surgery than I could accept. Now I can't find enough doctors to fill the training program. It won't be too long before there are not enough specialists to treat oral cancers.' " I asked the reason why there should be such a dramatic shift. He replied, "Young doctors today are more practical about the economics of medicine. So they are lining up to go into cosmetic surgery. They realize that in a couple of hours they can charge $20,000 for a face-lift operation. Or thousands doing nose jobs or quick nip and tucks on the [...]