2012 – Page 2 – Oral Cancer News

People lack knowledge about link between oral cancer, sexual health

Source: www.dentistrytoday.com Author: staff People don’t know enough about the link between oral cancer and sexual health, according to various studies. The general awareness about sexually transmitted infections has risen in recent years but most people still don’t know that the human papilloma virus can cause oral cancer. HPV is a common infection that may be spread through unprotected sex. Research has shown that HPV may become a larger reason for people developing oral cancer in the years to come. It could even rival smoking as a risk factor for oral cancer. Oral cancer cases have increased dramatically and one of the reasons is the lack of awareness about sexual activity and its impact on oral health. Recent data suggests that just one in four people could pinpoint HPV as a cause for oral cancer and about half of all people don’t know that HPV can be spread through sexual activity. In the past, oral cancer was an issue for older people who smoked and drank. Now, however, younger people are being afflicted with oral cancer because of the exposure to HPV. If people are more knowledgeable about the value of contraception, then oral cancer numbers may head back down. That’s why awareness and knowledge are some of the keys for limiting diseases like oral cancer.

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2012-12-12T19:41:24-07:00December, 2012|Oral Cancer News|

Caffeinated coffee lower oral cancer risk

Source: articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com Author: staff A new American Cancer Society study has found a strong inverse association between caffeinated coffee intake and oral/pharyngeal cancer mortality. The researchers revealed that people who drank more than four cups of caffeinated coffee per day were at about half the risk of death of these often fatal cancers compared to those who only occasionally or who never drank coffee. But they said that more research is needed to elucidate the biologic mechanisms that could be at work. Previous epidemiologic studies have suggested that coffee intake is associated with reduced risk of oral/pharyngeal cancer. To explore the finding further, researchers examined associations of caffeinated coffee, decaffeinated coffee, and tea intake with fatal oral/pharyngeal cancer in the Cancer Prevention Study II, a prospective U.S. cohort study begun in 1982 by the American Cancer Society. Among 968,432 men and women who were cancer-free at enrollment, 868 deaths due to oral/pharyngeal cancer occurred during 26 years of follow-up. The researchers found consuming more than four cups of caffeinated coffee per day was associated with a 49 percent lower risk of oral/pharyngeal cancer death relative to no/occasional coffee intake (RR 0.51, 95 percent confidence interval. A dose-related decline in relative risk was observed with each single cup per day consumed. The association was independent of sex, smoking status, or alcohol use. There was a suggestion of a similar link among those who drank more than two cups per day of decaffeinated coffee, although that finding was only marginally significant. No [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2012-12-12T19:38:15-07:00December, 2012|Oral Cancer News|

The effect of treating institution on outcomes in head and neck cancer

Source: American Academy of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery Alexandria, VA — Patients with head and neck cancer receiving radiation treatment at an academic center have a higher survival rate than those receiving treatment at a community center, according to a study in the December 2012 issue of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery. "Despite similar rates of treatment completion and rate of treatment breaks between groups, patients treated in academic centers had more advanced cancer but better survival," the authors state in their conclusion. The study evaluated differences in patient characteristics, treatment, and cancer outcomes in the head and neck cancer population at the University of Minnesota from 2002 through 2008. Data were gathered on demographics, general medical data, tumor variables, insurance type, marital status and health behaviors. The study analyzed 355 patients with mucosal head and neck cancer treated with radiation therapy from 2002 to 2008. One hundred forty-five (41%) received radiation treatment at community hospitals, and 210 (59%) were treated at academic hospitals. Within the academic hospitals group, 197 underwent radiation at the University of Minnesota, and 13 received radiation at an alternative academic center. Both treatment groups shared similar characteristics in regard to sex, comorbidity, marital status, work status, insurance, and alcohol use. However, the community group had more current smokers and slightly older patients on average. Patients in the academic group were more likely to live in an urban location and had a higher median income. Patients undergoing radiation treatment at university centers had significantly more advanced [...]

Charlotte Parker2012-12-07T12:47:56-07:00December, 2012|Oral Cancer News|

In Fine Print of Fiscal Debate, Charities Unite to Defend Deductions

Source: The New York Times Date: December 5, 2012 By ANNIE LOWREY WASHINGTON — Proposals to cap or otherwise limit deductions in order to raise tax revenue from the wealthy are gaining bipartisan support in Washington — and making charities and nonprofits very worried. Concerned that special tax benefits to encourage Americans to give to charity might be significantly curtailed in the negotiations between President Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner, scores of nonprofit leaders came to Washington this week for a coordinated lobbying effort. “Normally, every nonprofit is focused on its own particular mission, whether saving the environment, or helping children, or imbuing a greater appreciation for art,” said Diana Aviv, the chief executive of Independent Sector, an umbrella group for nonprofits that helped organize this week’s effort. “For the first time, I’ve seen the sector coming together. We’re like Rip Van Winkle waking up and saying, This is not O.K.!” At stake is the $300 billion that Americans donate to nonprofits every year — and the $50 billion a year that tax deductions for charitable giving costs the government. Both Republicans and Democrats say they want to maintain tax laws that encourage Americans to give money to nonprofit groups. But with the White House looking to raise an additional $1.6 trillion in revenue over 10 years, and Republicans looking to raise $800 billion, there is growing bipartisan support for peeling back some of the special breaks for high-income households. That prospect has spurred Ms. Aviv and other nonprofit leaders [...]

Charlotte Parker2012-12-06T13:25:04-07:00December, 2012|Oral Cancer News|

Reirradiation for Recurrent Head and Neck Cancer

Source: Medscape News Date: November 29, 2012 Abstract Recurrence of head and neck cancer in a previously irradiated volume presents a challenging problem and has poor prognosis. A minority of patients are eligible for the preferred therapy, surgical resection. Systemic therapy is offered to patients with unresectable disease but offers little, if any, chance of cure. Repeat irradiation with systemic therapy is a potentially curative option. One randomized trial and several cooperative group and institutional studies support its use. Long-term disease-free survival has been observed, albeit with the risk of significant, possibly life threatening, late complications. Intensity-modulated radiotherapy has been shown to reduce toxicity and improve disease control. Novel systemic therapies and radiotherapy techniques, including stereotactic body radiotherapy, are under active study. Introduction Radiation therapy plays a central role in the treatment of head and neck cancer (HNC) patients. Within a treatment paradigm of functional organ preservation, evidence-based guidelines recommend radiotherapy for three quarters of all patients with HNC. [1] Both organ-preserving definitive chemoradiotherapy (CRT) and selective postoperative CRT improve locoregional recurrence (LRR) and prolong overall survival (OS). [2,3] Nevertheless, despite improvements, LRR after CRT continues to be a vexing problem for 20–35% of patients. [4–8] Even patients with favorable prognosis human papillomavirus-related HNC [9] have a LRR rate of nearly 15%. [4] Locoregional recurrence is related to a number of different factors. Some tumors are inherently radioresistant. Additionally, as radiation is delivered more precisely with smaller margins, the potential for recurrences related to 'marginal misses' has increased. Ongoing exposure [...]

Charlotte Parker2012-12-05T14:26:22-07:00December, 2012|Oral Cancer News|

Aerosmith’s Tom Hamilton Is Cancer Free

Source: RTT News Date: November 30, 2012 After a long six-year battle, Aerosmith's Tom Hamilton is finally cancer free. The bassist was first diagnosed with tongue and throat cancer in 2006. "I'm feeling really good," Hamilton told BackstageAxxess. "The doctor who treated me in 2009 said, 'Listen, I can help you in a way that is going to preserve your way of life. But you're going to have to come in here a lot afterwards for a long time.' I said, 'Sign me up!' I go in there about every two to three months. I get looked at by having the doctor put a scope down my throat. It's a nerve-wracking process, but I don't have to worry about it for a couple of months and I'm feeling great." After he was originally treated in 2006, the cancer returned three years later, but now his doctor has given him the great news that another return is unlikely. by RTT Staff Writer This news story was resourced by the Oral Cancer Foundation, and vetted for appropriateness and accuracy.

Charlotte Parker2012-12-06T18:25:15-07:00December, 2012|Oral Cancer News|

Food preservatives don’t preserve oral cancer

Source: bigkingken.wordpress.com Food preservatives are a common part of everyday life for those Americans who don’t go to extremes to avoid them. Twinkies will be around for thousands of years despite the dissolution of Hostess and I’m pretty sure there’s an unspoiled Big Mac somewhere that’s been hanging out for several decades. Besides grossly keeping the hamburger on the left untarnished for more than a decade, food preservatives might be an untapped resource in the fight against cancer. In short, food preservatives work by killing off any and all microbial life forms that come along to munch on the food before us humans have a chance to send it down to our bellies. Now, if these food preservatives are so effective at killing off unwanted bacteria in our food supplies, could they perhaps also be effective at killing off other unwanted life forms? This is a question being asked by a lot of medical researchers at the moment, with at least one group finding an answer in the affirmative. Recently, researchers at the University of Michigan found that the common food preservative Nisin also does an excellent job of holding off – and even shrinking – the most common and deadly form of oral cancer, squamous cell head and neck cancer (HNSCC). HNSCC is a particularly nasty form of cancer, seeing as it accounts for more than 90 percent of oral cancers yet hasn’t had its mortality rates improved in the past several decades. On the other side, [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2012-11-30T06:02:23-07:00November, 2012|Oral Cancer News|

High school gamers are better than medical residents at robotic surgery

Source: killscreendaily.com Author: Joseph Bernstein Science Daily reports: Both high school sophomores who played video games on average two hours per day and college students who played four hours of video games daily matched, and in some cases exceeded, the skills of the residents on parameters that included how much tension the subjects put on their instruments, how precise their hand-eye coordination was and how steady their grasping skills were when performing surgical tasks suck as suturing, passing a needle or lifting surgical instruments with the robotic arms. "The inspiration for this study first developed when I saw my son, an avid video game player, take the reins of a robotic surgery simulator at a medical convention," said Dr. Sami Kilic, lead author of the study and associate professor and director of minimally invasive gynecology in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at UTMB. "With no formal training, he was immediately at ease with the technology and the type of movements required to operate the robot." Kilic came up the idea for the study during a demonstration of the robotic da Vinci Surgical System. A company representative was giving surgeons turns manipulating the da Vinci, and one user was doing particularly well. Kilic, impressed, walked over to the operations console to see who the ace was. "It was my 10-year-old son," Kilic says. Kilic's son, and most of the test subjects, were shooting game buffs. Kilic says that the hand eye coordination and response time for people of his son's [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2012-11-30T05:52:07-07:00November, 2012|Oral Cancer News|

Ten year results of landmark neck cancer trial published

Source: www.modernmedicine.com Author: Gabriel Miller The latest data from a trial that opened in 1992 confirm that for locally advanced laryngeal cancer, sequential and concomitant chemoradiotherapy each produce similar survival rates, but the concomitant approach more often allows the larynx to be preserved. When the results of RTOG 91-11 were first published in 2003. "they changed the standard of care treatment for preserving the larynx from the sequential use of chemotherapy then radiotherapy to giving both together," said lead investigator Dr. Arlene Forastiere of Johns Hopkins University in an email to Reuters Health. "The results have held up over the last decade," she said, "...and this exact treatment remains the standard of care today because on average, 15% will ultimately require laryngectomy with the concomitant approach, compared to double that, or 30%, with either giving chemotherapy and radiation in sequence or giving radiotherapy alone." "There's no question that this study has changed the way we approach and treat this disease, so it is truly a landmark study," said Dr. Chris Holsinger, a head and neck cancer surgeon at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas who wasn't involved in the research. Between 1992 and 2000, 547 patients were randomly assigned to three treatment groups: induction chemotherapy followed by radiation; concomitant chemoradiotherapy; and radiotherapy alone. The induction group received up to three cycles of cisplatin 100 mg/m2 on day one and fluorouracil 1,000 mg/m2 per day for five days, every three weeks. Responders then received up to 70 Gy of radiotherapy [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2012-11-30T05:39:25-07:00November, 2012|Oral Cancer News|

Global burden of cancer: opportunities for prevention

Source: The Lancet, Volume 380, Issue 9856, Pages 1797 - 1799, 24 November 2012 In The Lancet, Isabelle Soerjomataram and colleagues report that about 169 million years of healthy life were lost due to cancer worldwide in 2008 alone, based on a summary measure (disability-adjusted life-years [DALY] lost) that combines years lived with disability and years of life lost because of premature death. By contrast with mortality rates and counts, which emphasize deaths occurring at old ages, DALY give more weight to deaths occurring at young ages at which people are more likely to be working, raising children, and supporting other family members. Worldwide, the highest DALY rates were noted in eastern African countries (eg, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Zambia) in women and in several high-income and middle-income countries (eg, Hungary and Uruguay) in men. Despite the substantial limitations inherent in the modeling of sparse cancer registry data and various assumptions about the natural history of every disease and related variables, these findings emphasize the growing burden of cancer in economically developing countries. This burden is partly due to the ageing and growth of the population and marketing-driven adoption of unhealthy lifestyles such as tobacco use and consumption of high-calorie food, as well as limited progress in reduction of infection-related cancers.2 Opportunities exist to reduce these major risk factors and the associated cancer burden through broad implementation of proven interventions specific to every country's economic development level. These interventions include tobacco control, improvement of opportunities for physical activity and healthier dietary patterns, [...]

Charlotte Parker2012-11-28T11:10:26-07:00November, 2012|Oral Cancer News|