November 2008 – Page 2 – Oral Cancer News

Experts say new tobacco product targets young adults

Source: www.marketwatch.com Author: staff New research at West Virginia University is examining whether a smokeless, spitless tobacco product aimed at young adults is catching on. And the researchers have found that RJ Reynolds' Camel Snus - touted as a socially acceptable way to satisfy addiction - contains surprisingly high levels of nicotine. "Camel Snus contains more nicotine than most other snuff products," said Bruce Adkins of the state Division of Tobacco Prevention in Charleston. "In fact, the Camel Snus currently being marketed in West Virginia contains double the nicotine of an earlier tested version sold elsewhere in the United States. This provides a new example of the tobacco companies' manipulating nicotine levels without informing consumers." "West Virginia has extremely high rates of smokeless tobacco use and high rates of smoking," said Cindy Tworek, Ph.D., a member of WVU's Translational Tobacco Reduction Research Program (T2R2). "It would appear that tobacco companies are trying to strategically market new smokeless, spitless tobacco products in these areas of high use, such as West Virginia, and also promoting their use as a way to get nicotine in places where you can't smoke." T2R2 is a joint effort of the Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center at WVU and the West Virginia Prevention Research Center. Tworek is conducting a survey of several hundred young adults on or around college campuses in West Virginia to see whether the product's marketing has scored a hit. She hopes to have results compiled early in 2009. Snus comes in a pouch [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-11-23T09:38:24-07:00November, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Modestan who survived mouth cancer looks forward to Thanksgiving with family — and food

Source: www.modbee.com Author: Sue Nowicki This Thanksgiving, when Wenona "Wendy" Campbell sits down to a turkey dinner with all the fixin's, she will relish every bite. Last year, she couldn't eat a thing. A feeding tube prevented that. Campbell, 65, had been diagnosed with lymph node mouth cancer in September 2007. Doctors gave her only a 50-50 chance to live. Between October and the end of December, the Modesto resident had the most aggressive kind of chemotherapy combined with radiation treatments from her mouth down to her upper chest. Last Thanksgiving, she was in the midst of all of that. "Most people, 99 percent, who get mouth cancer have used some type of tobacco," Campbell said. "I'm the 1 percent. I never smoked, never chewed, never lived with a smoker. My doctor couldn't believe that I had mouth cancer." The first sign that something was wrong was a small lump on the side of her neck. "My family said it was probably just a swollen lymph node and that I'd be OK. Normally, I'd go to the doctor, but I was taking care of two parents with Alzheimer's. I hadn't placed them in (care) facilities at the time. My brother and I were trying to keep these sweet people in their home. "I was very foolish. After about a month, it had swollen to about the size of a pingpong ball. I did go to the doctor about halfway through that time. He said, 'This could be just an infection,' [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-11-23T09:31:33-07:00November, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Iressa as good as chemotherapy for lung cancer

Source: health.usnews.com Author: Steven Reinberg The cancer-fighting pill Iressa works as well as chemotherapy as a second-line treatment for lung cancer, researchers report. Although neither therapy prolongs survival beyond eight months, Iressa (gefitinib) causes fewer serious side effects and may be a better choice for patients who did not do well on their first round of chemotherapy. "A pill, with less side effects, taken once a day, has similar activity to traditional chemotherapy given by vein every three weeks," said lead researcher Dr. Edward Kim, an assistant professor at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. This finding should reassure doctors that they are not compromising effective therapy by using a pill, Kim said. Iressa is not available in the United States, but a similar drug, Tarceva, is. Iressa was first developed by AstraZeneca, but it failed to meet expectations. The National Cancer Institute ended clinical trials of the drug in 2005 because it failed to prolong the lives of lung cancer patients. The latest finding has meaning for these patients, however, Kim said. "You can be treated for lung cancer. There are different therapies available, and they have different side-effect profiles," he said. "Chemotherapy will never be eliminated, but we are getting more options for targeted therapy; and people can live as normal a life as they can bearing the weight of lung cancer." The report was published in the Nov. 22 issue of The Lancet. In a head-to-head comparison, Kim's team randomly assigned 1,466 lung cancer patients [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-11-23T09:25:18-07:00November, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Early-stage head and neck cancer in patients 80 years of age or older highly treatable

Source: professional.cancerconsultants.com Author: staff Researchers from France have reported that patients 80 years of age or older with Stage I-II head and neck cancer have good outcomes following surgery or radiation therapy. The details of this study appeared in an early online publication in Cancer on October 17, 2008.[1] Although most cancers occur in older individuals, this patient population is not proportionately represented in current clinical trials. In fact, many trials specifically exclude older patients on the assumption that they will not tolerate the protocol therapies. Thus, the results of many clinical trials are only applicable to the minority of younger patients with a specific type of cancer. In a recent study, researchers affiliated with ECOG looked at 53 patients with head and neck cancers who were 70 years or older. These patients were entered on two randomized trials and represented only 13% of the study group. However, the median age of patients with head and neck cancer is over the age of 65 years. This shows that a disproportionate number of younger patients are included in these trials. However, in this study the results in elderly patients were as good as for younger patients but with more treatment-related toxicities. This study looked at the outcomes of 316 patients with head and neck cancer who were 80 years of age or older treated in a single institution from 1987 to 2006. Thirty-one percent of patients received surgery, and 57% received definitive radiotherapy. Patients with Stage I-II head and neck cancer [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-11-22T08:09:13-07:00November, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

New platinum-phosphate compounds kill ovarian vancer cells, other cancer cells

Source: www.sciencedaily.com Author: staff A new class of compounds called phosphaplatins can effectively kill ovarian, testicular, head and neck cancer cells with potentially less toxicity than conventional drugs, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The compounds could be less harmful than current cancer treatments on the market such as cisplatin and carboplatin because they don’t penetrate the cell nucleus and attach to DNA, said lead author Rathindra Bose. Conventional drugs can interfere with the functions of the cell’s enzymes, which lead to side effects such as hearing and hair loss and kidney dysfunction. Though scientists don’t fully understand the mechanism by which the phosphaplatins kill cancer cells, they suspect that the compounds bind to the cell surface membrane proteins and transmit a “death signal” to the interior of the cell, Bose said. The compounds are created by attaching platinum to a phosphate ligand, which can readily anchor to the cell membrane. Future studies will focus on identifying the exact process. “The findings suggest a paradigm shift in potential molecular targets for platinum anticancer drugs and in their strategic development,” said Bose, a professor of biomedical sciences and chemistry and vice president for research at Ohio University who conducted the work while at Northern Illinois University. The first drug developed for the treatment of ovarian and testicular cancers, cisplatin, was approved for use in 1982. Though it’s 95 percent effective, it works best during the early stages of the disease, and [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-11-22T08:00:49-07:00November, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Cancer: the effects of canola oil and broccoli

Source: www.canada.com/montrealgazette Author: staff Replacing corn oil with canola oil may lower cancer risk not only for women but for their unborn babies, U.S. researchers reported yesterday. They found that mice fed canola oil while pregnant were less likely to develop breast cancer - and so were their unborn pups - than mice fed corn oil. The findings are probably because of omega-6 fatty acids, the researchers told a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. Some research has linked high amounts of omega-6 fatty acids to health problems including cancer. Fifty per cent of the fatty acids in corn oil are omega-6, while just 20 per cent of the fatty acids in canola oil are. And canola oil is much richer than corn oil in omega-3 fatty acids, which are linked with heart and cancer benefits. Broccoli and similar vegetables appear to offer special protection from cancer for smokers, researchers reported. They found that former smokers and, especially, people still smoking heavily got special benefits from eating the vegetables. "The most significant effect was in heavy smokers," said Li Tang of Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., who led the study. People who smoked more than 20 cigarettes a day were considered heavy smokers. Smoking raises the risk of many types of cancer, including lung cancer, head and neck cancer and bladder cancer. Broccoli and other so-called cruciferous vegetables such as cabbage, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts have been known to lower the risk of cancer in general, [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-11-22T07:32:33-07:00November, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Study finds new tobacco product highly addictive

Source: www.wtrf.com Author: Courtney Dunn Are makers of a new tobacco product targeting young adults in West Virginia? That is the question of a study being conducted in our area. West Virginia University researchers have made some startling discoveries about a new tobacco product. Not only are they calling it highly addictive, but they also believe tobacco companies are trying to strategically market the product in high-use areas, like West Virginia. The new spit-less, smokeless tobacco product can be found at local gas station convenience stores. It is called Camel Snus. Researchers say the pouches have more nicotine than most other smokeless products. That is something they say is particularly alarming because it is being advertised as a socially acceptable alternative. "This is not a health product," said Dr. Alan Ducatman, the WVU Hospitals Chair of the Department of Community Medicine. "This is a product designed to get people to use it over time and even though it hasn't been around all that long, they already found in Scandinavia, health consequences are already being studied and detected." Ducatman says those consequences can range from oral to pancreatic cancer, hypertension and even heart disease. On the back of Camel's "Snusing Guide" there is a label warning the product may cause mouth cancer. You also have to be 18 to buy it. Because it is virtually undetectable researchers worry it is something that will catch on around college campuses and with even younger age groups.

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-11-22T07:27:00-07:00November, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Survival of head and neck cancer patients is greatly affected by coexisting ailments

Source: mednews.wustl.edu Author: Gwen Ericson Current estimates for head and neck cancer survival are largely inaccurate because they widely disregard many of the most common diseases such patients have in addition to their primary cancer, says Jay Piccirillo, M.D., a head and neck specialist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the Siteman Cancer Center and Barnes-Jewish Hospital. This highlights a broader problem with cancer survival statistics, which generally don't take into account the effect of co-existing conditions, or comorbidities, according to Piccirillo. In a recent study, Piccirillo, director of the Clinical Outcomes Research Office at Washington University School of Medicine and professor of otolaryngology, showed that the risk of death increased up to seven-fold when patients with head and neck cancer developed new or more severe co-existing ailments such as heart problems, diabetes or lung disorders after cancer diagnosis. The study, published in the October issue of the Archives of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, is the first to look at comorbidities in head and neck cancer patients in the period following diagnosis. "For decades, we have used a cancer staging system based on tumor size, lymph node involvement and whether cancer has spread to other parts of the body when estimating a patient's survival while mostly ignoring how sick patients are from other diseases," Piccirillo says. "In fact, national databases used to estimate cancer survival don't account for comorbidities, and as a result, we don't have very accurate estimates of how long patients are likely to [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-11-21T14:36:13-07:00November, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Lorillard at Morgan Stanley

Source: www.apply-best-credit-card.com Author: staff Executives of cigarette maker Lorillard Inc. are scheduled to speak to investors Tuesday at the Morgan Stanley Global Consumer & Retail Conference. Chief Executive Martin L. Orlowsky and Chief Financial Officer David H. Taylor are scheduled to speak at 10:30 a.m. EST. Greensboro, N.C.-based Lorillard sells Newport, Kent and Old Gold cigarettes. The company was spun off from Loews Corp. in June, a move that may have made it a more attractive acquisition target. The tobacco industry has been consolidating, with U.S. sellers becoming more aggressive about smokeless products such as moist smokeless, chewing tobacco and snus. Snus is a teabag-like pouch users stick between their cheek and gum. Altria Group Inc., which owns Marlboro maker Philip Morris USA, is expected to close on its acquisition of smokeless tobacco leader UST Inc. by the first week of January. Reynolds American Inc. owns the Conwood business and sells moist snuff under the Grizzly brand.

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-11-21T14:31:35-07:00November, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Smoking and drinking linked to throat and stomach cancer

Source: uk.reuters.com Author: Michael Kahn Drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes appear to increase the risk of certain common throat and stomach cancers, Dutch researchers reported on Monday. The findings, presented at an American Association for Cancer Research meeting in Washington, underline other health recommendations for people to follow a healthy lifestyle and drink and smoke only in moderation. "It appeared that current smokers have the highest risks, and former smokers have an intermediate risk compared with never smokers," Jessie Steevens, an epidemiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, said in a statement. The incidence of stomach cancer has fallen dramatically in the United States and western Europe over the past 60 years but the disease remains a serious problem in much of the rest of the world, where it is a leading cause of cancer death, according to the Mayo Clinic. Oesophageal, or throat, cancer is a form of cancer that starts in the inner layer of the oesophagus, the 10-inch-long tube that connects the throat to the stomach. The researchers followed more than 120,000 Dutch residents for more than two decades to investigate risk factors for oesophageal adenocarcinoma and gastric cardia adenocarcinoma -- a type of stomach cancer -- as well as oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma, which resembles head and neck cancer. Other studies have linked oesophageal cancer in general to drinking and smoking, but Steevens and colleagues wanted to refine the risk of the different types of the tumours. They found that for oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma -- [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-11-19T18:43:46-07:00November, 2008|Oral Cancer News|