Oral Cancer Foundation News Team – A – Page 225

Health officials not convinced snus will help smokers quit

Source: www.theintelligencer.net Author: staff They're discreet, flavorful and come in cute tin boxes with names like ''frost'' and ''spice.'' And the folks who created Joe Camel are hoping Camel Snus will become a hit with tobacco lovers tired of being forced outside for a smoke. But convincing health officials and smokers like Ethan Flint that they're worth a try may take some work. Snus - Swedish for tobacco, rhymes with ''noose'' - is a tiny, tea bag-like pouch of steam-pasteurized, smokeless tobacco to tuck between the cheek and gum. Aromatic to the user and undetectable to anyone else, it promises a hit of nicotine without the messy spitting associated with chewing tobacco. Just swallow the juice. ''I think I'd rather throw up in my mouth,'' says Flint, an 18-year-old West Virginia University student, emerging from a convenience store with a pack of Winstons and a coupon for free Camel Snus. ''I'd rather not swallow anything like that.'' Reynolds America Inc., the nation's No. 2 tobacco company, can also expect resistance from the public health community. Experts wonder whether snus will help wean people off cigarettes and snuff, or just foster a second addiction. While snus has been around, it hasn't been prominent in this country. ''I think we're all holding our breath in terms of what's going to be coming down the pike,'' says Dorothy Hatsukami, director of the Tobacco Use Research Center at the University of Minnesota. ''There's not much known about these products - what's in these products, [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-11-24T12:13:24-07:00November, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Reynolds American to sell dissolvable tobacco

Source: biz.yahoo.com Author: Vinnee Tong Reynolds American gave details to investors Monday about its latest smokeless tobacco products, saying that it would begin selling Camel brand dissolvable tobacco products in mid- to late January in three trial markets. The nation's second-biggest tobacco company said that dissolvable strips, orbs and sticks -- made from finely milled tobacco -- will be sold early next year, starting in Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis; and Portland, Ore. They come in fresh and mellow flavors. Among their biggest selling points for smokers, who have fewer and fewer places to light up, is that there is no spitting and nothing left to throw away. Cigarette companies are trying to find new ways of selling tobacco as cigarette demand has fallen because of smoking bans, health concerns and social pressure. They are focusing more on cigars and smokeless products such as moist snuff, chewing tobacco and snus. Anti-tobacco groups objected last month when Reynolds first said it would begin selling dissolvable tobacco. "These new products pose serious threats to the nation's health," a statement from the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids said then. "They are likely to appeal to children because they are flavored and packaged like candy, are easy to conceal even in a classroom and carry the Camel brand that is already so popular with underage smokers." Reynolds, which sells Camel, Kool and American Spirit cigarettes, defended the new dissolvable tobacco in part by saying the products come in child-resistant packs. The company's dissolvable tobacco products come in [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-11-23T18:01:10-07:00November, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Cost of smoking still staggering

Source: www.pe.com Author: Lora Hines The number of smokers nationwide dropped last year, but the amount of money they rack up in health care and financial losses is on the rise, according to federal health officials. In 2007, more than 43 million people smoked, compared to an estimated 45 million smokers in 2006, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Despite the decrease, average annual smoking-related costs reached nearly $100 billion between 2001 and 2004, compared to $75 billion in 1998, the agency found. Smoking's total annual economic burden comes close to $195 billion, which includes lost productivity. The CDC released the information as the American Cancer Society today marks its 32nd Great American Smokeout, the organization's annual campaign to encourage people to quit smoking. Tobacco use still is the single largest preventable cause of disease and premature death in the United States, according to the society. Smoking causes an estimated 438,000 people to die prematurely every year. That includes 38,000 deaths of nonsmokers because of secondhand smoke. Half of all people who keep smoking will die from smoking-related diseases, the organization says. "Quitting smoking is the most important step smokers can take to improve their health and protect the health of nonsmoking family members," said Janet Collins, director of the CDC's National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. State Program Praised Meanwhile, UC San Francisco researchers earlier this year concluded that the California Tobacco Control Program saved the state $86 billion in health-care costs between [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-11-23T17:56:17-07:00November, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Battle of his life

Source: www.hattiesburgamerican.com Author: Patrick Magee Barney Farrar has never been one to back down from any type of fight. The Mississippi native is a determined man whose tenacity makes him a passionate coach and dogged recruiter as a member of the Southern Miss football team's coaching staff. He's also known as a compassionate man who will make a visit on his own to the ailing parents of one of the countless high school coaches he's gotten to know over his lengthy career of recruiting his home state. So when word came down in July that Farrar had been diagnosed with throat cancer, the reaction sent waves around the close community of football coaches. He received many calls from coaching cohorts wishing him well. Once the kind words were behind him, Farrar battened down for the biggest battle of his life, which has yet to reach a full conclusion. "They diagnosed it as a category three, but they moved it up to a category four because of the size of the tumor. That scared me," Farrar said. "They told me to not be too alarmed over that at that point because it was just the size that moved me into the worst category." From there, it was a matter of finding the right course of treatment for the lump in his throat that doctors say had likely been there for a year, when he was living in Iowa, before it was diagnosed by Hattiesburg physicians. Farrar, 48, visited different clinics around [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-11-23T17:51:28-07:00November, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Eli Lilly buys majority of ImClone in tender offer

Source: money.cnn.com Author: staff Drug developer Eli Lilly & Co. said Friday it completed a tender offer worth about $6 billion for ImClone Systems Inc., marking Lilly's biggest buyout in the biotechnology industry. The company announced the $70-per-share tender offer in October. The bid topped two prior offers from Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., which is ImClone's partner on the blockbuster drug Erbitux. Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly bought about 85.4 million shares of New York-based ImClone, representing about 95 percent of the outstanding stock. The company plans to complete the buyout through a short-form merger on or about Nov. 24. in which all remaining shares of ImClone will be converted into the right to receive $70 per share in cash. With the buyout, Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly adds the blockbuster colon and head and neck cancer drug Erbitux to its list of products. Eli Lilly, which sells a range of treatments from Byetta for diabetes to Cymbalta for depression, has been bulking up its biotechnology capabilities along with several other large pharmaceutical companies. Eli Lilly already gets about a third of its annual revenue from biotechnology drugs, which are developed using living cells instead of chemical compounds. The company has already invested $1 billion into a biotech center in Indianapolis, while building a biotech facility in Ireland.

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-11-23T09:40:56-07:00November, 2008|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|

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