Oral Cancer News – Page 250

Effects of external irradiation of the neck region on intima media thickness of the common carotid artery

Source: 7thspace.com/headlines Author: staff Several studies have shown that common carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) is increased after radiotherapy (RT) to the head and neck. However, further studies are needed to define the exact mechanism of radiation-induced injury in large vessels, investigate the relationship between radiation dose and large vessel injury and evaluate the rate of progress of atherosclerosis in irradiated vessels. Objectives: To investigate whether external irradiation to the carotid area has any effect on IMT of the common carotid artery in a group of patients who received RT vs control group matched for age, gender and race. Methods: We studied 19 patients (10 male; 47.8 +/- 17.4 years) during a 5-month period (January 2009- July 2009); they had completed RT with a mean of 2.9 years before (range: 1 month-6 years) The mean radiation dose to the neck in the irradiated patients was 41.2 +/- 15.6 Gy (range: 25-70 Gy). Common carotid IMT was measured with echo-color Doppler. Nineteen healthy adult patients (10 male; 47.8 +/- 17.6) were recruited as a control group. Results: IMT was not significantly higher in patients when compared to the control group (0.59 +/- 0.16 vs 0.56 +/- 0.16 mm, p=0.4). There was no significant difference between the two groups in relation to the absence (p= 0.7) or presence (p= 0.6) of vascular risk factors. Although the difference did not reach statistical significance (p=0.1), the irradiated young patients (age [less than or equal to] 52 years) had IMT measurements higher (0.54 +/- 0.08 mm) [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-03-21T10:46:21-07:00March, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Needed: HPV vaccine, simple screening test, for women and men

Source: jhu.edu/~gazette Author: Valerie Mehl, Johns Hopkins Medicine A call to explore a broader use of human papillomavirus vaccines and the validation of a simple oral screening test for HPV-caused oral cancers are reported in two studies by an investigator at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. Leading HPV expert Maura Gillison, the first to identify HPV infection as the cause of certain oral cancers and who identified multiple sex partners as the most important risk factor for these cancers, reports her latest work Nov. 3 in the journal Clinical Cancer Research and in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention monograph. The CDC report on HPV-associated cancers appears online Nov. 3 and in the Nov. 15 supplement edition of Cancer. In the CDC report, believed to be the first and most comprehensive assessment of HPV-associated cancer data in the United States, investigators analyzed cancer registry data from 1998 to 2003 and found 25,000 cancer cases each year occurred at cancer sites associated with HPV infection. In additional analysis, Gillison and colleagues at the National Cancer Institute identified HPV infection as the underlying cause of approximately 20,000 of these cancers. Gillison and her team found that approximately 20,000 cases of cancer in the United States each year are caused by HPV infection. Oral cancers are the second most common type of HPV- associated cancers and are increasing in incidence in the United States, particularly among men. Add to that anal, penile, vaginal and vulvar cancers that are [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-03-19T21:39:40-07:00March, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

With cancer, let’s face it: words are inadequate

Source: nytimes.com Author: Dana Jennings We’re all familiar with sentences like this one: Mr. Smith died yesterday after a long battle with cancer. We think we know what it means, but we read it and hear it so often that it carries little weight, bears no meaning. It’s one of the clichés of cancer. It is easy shorthand. But it says more about the writer or speaker than it does about the deceased. We like to say that people “fight” cancer because we wrestle fearfully with the notion of ever having the disease. We have turned cancer into one of our modern devils. But after staggering through prostate cancer and its treatment — surgery, radiation and hormone therapy — the words “fight” and “battle” make me cringe and bristle. I sometimes think of cancer as a long and difficult journey, a quest out of Tolkien, or a dark waltz — but never a battle. How can it be a battle when we patients are the actual battleground? We are caught in the middle, between our doctors and their potential tools of healing and the cell-devouring horde. We become a wasteland, at once infested by the black dust of cancer and damaged by the “friendly fire” of treatment. And ordinary language falls far short of explaining that keen sense of oblivion. As a patient, it’s hard to articulate how being seriously ill feels. In a profound way, we are boiled down to our essential animal selves. We crave survival. We long [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-03-18T14:19:46-07:00March, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Reynolds tobacco closer to buying smoking cessation products company

Source: Beasley Allen Law Firm Author: Kurt Niland Reynolds American, the second largest American producer of cigarettes and other tobacco products, is in the advanced stages of negotiating a purchase of Niconovum, a Swedish company that manufacturessmoking cessation. If the deal works, as it appears it will, it shows the determination of the tobacco giants to cash in on the “whole cycle of a smoker from the first puff to the last piece of gum,” said Chip Brian, a business analyst for SmarTrend. Based in Helsingborg, Sweden, Niconovum produces nicotine-replacement therapies (NRTS), smoking cessation products designed to provide users with a smokeless form of nicotine relief. Niconovum’s products are Zonnicpouches (small bags containing a nicotine powder that users put beneath their lips), Zonnic “pepparmint” [sic] mouth spray, and Zonnic gum. SmarTrend’s analyst points out that both Reynolds and the Altria Group, owner of Philip Morris USA and other tobacco product companies, ownpharmaceutical companies, but Reynolds’ purchase of Niconovum would be the first time a tobacco giant marketed and sold a smoking cessationproduct. According to the Wall Street Journal, “the potential deal would mark the latest and most dramatic move by Reynolds into nicotine products that represent alternatives to cigarettes.” “Sales of cigarettes in the U.S. have been declining for years, prompting Reynolds to move into products that studies have shown present much smaller health risks than cigarettes,” the WSJ explains. Reynolds’ acquisition of Niconovum might seem contradictory and even hypocritical, but it makes good sense for the tobacco company. Somesmoking [...]

Charlotte Parker2010-04-19T22:30:41-07:00March, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Are e-cigarettes too good to be true?

Source: Beasley Allen Law Firm Author: Kurt Niland I have that “born late” feeling. I quit smoking before I had a chance to “smoke” electronic cigarettes, the latest and most overtly sci-fi smoking cessation tool to come along in my lifetime. My first attempt to quit smoking was in 1989, 4 years after I started smoking, when my college roommate yanked a brand-new pack of smokes out of my hand and chucked them to the middle of a retaining pond near our New Mexico State dorm. I had given Keith my permission to do that or something like it “if you ever catch me with a pack of cigarettes again,” which was about seven hours earlier that same day. Subsequent attempts to quit involved Zyban, nicotine gum, nicotine patches, nicotine lozenges, various herbal “de-tox” remedies, and Chantix. I even bought this little gadget that punched holes in my cigarettes, allowing most of the smoke to escape through the filter. As ingenious as that device seemed to me, it was as frustrating as trying to drink with a broken straw. After a minute of sucking air, I simply got another straw that wasn’t broken. Eventually, the only method I had left to try was the primitive, old-fashioned cold turkey method. Had electronic cigarettes been around when I was trying to quit, I assure you, I would have bought them. The idea of an alternative cigarette is so appealing that many smokers probably have conceived of a fake cigarette at some point in their lives. I remember [...]

Charlotte Parker2010-03-18T10:39:18-07:00March, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Oral cancer survivor wins fourth straight Iditarod

Source: CNN Author: Tracy Sabo (CNN) -- Lance Mackey rode into Nome, Alaska, and the record books, becoming the first musher to win the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race four times in a row. The 39-year-old throat cancer survivor from Fairbanks completed the 1,049-mile race in 8 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 9 seconds on Tuesday, the second-fastest finish in race history. "Even the doctors who said I would never race dogs again doubted what I was able to do," he said. "You know, people are easy to judge and doubt somebody's ability, but the mind is a very powerful thing." Among the throngs that boisterously cheered as Mackey pulled up to the burled arch on Nome's Front Street was his father, Dick Mackey, the 1978 Iditarod champion. "You've done something that will never be repeated, son," the senior Mackey said as he greeted his son with a hug. "I told my Dad I think I got one more in me, though," the younger Mackey said later. Mackey has dominated the sport in recent years and is the 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 Iditarod champion. He was inducted into the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame in February "for capturing multiple titles in two of the world's longest sled dog races." Mackey is also a four-time champion of the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest race from Fairbanks to Nome, as well as the record-holder for the most (four) consecutive first place finishes in that race. On Tuesday, Mackey took home $50,000 and a [...]

Charlotte Parker2010-04-19T22:31:12-07:00March, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

George vs. The Dragon

Source: ESPN.com Author: Rick Reilly DAY 17: Tuesday, March 9, 7:30 a.m. -- Denver Nuggets coach George Karl pops in his mouthpiece and puts on his helmet and braces himself for a brutal 15 minutes, but this isn't football. This is cancer radiation. We're at Denver's Swedish Medical Center. The helmet is actually a white, hard-mesh mask that fits to every contour of Karl's big bucket head. It has red crosses all over it, like a hockey goalie's. He lays his 283 pounds on the table and the technicians clamp the mask on hard. How Karl breathes I'll never know. They secure his limbs and ask him to hold a blue plastic donut so no part of him moves. He looks like Hannibal Lecter about to get fried. "It makes you a little claustrophobic," the 58-year-old coach tries to say through the mask. "But what are you gonna do? Leave?" Coaching the wildly talented but wildly uneven Nuggets is hard enough, let alone doing it with throat and neck cancer, but that's what Karl is trying to do. Everybody tells him it's not possible, and today, maybe he's starting to believe them. With only three of his torturous six weeks of treatment done, and the inside of his mouth looking like he just took 100 bites out of a lava-hot pizza slice, and his head throbbing and his eyes hollow, Karl looks like a guy who should be on a stretcher, not an NBA bench. "George, this is only going [...]

Charlotte Parker2010-03-18T09:51:54-07:00March, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

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 [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-03-18T08:51:12-07:00March, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

HPV vaccine reduced further disease in women treated for cancer precursors

Source: www.hemonctoday.com Author: staff HPV vaccine quadrivalent (types 6, 11, 16 and 18) decreased HPV-related disease in women previously treated for cancer precursors, according to the post-hoc analysis of findings from two trials. Warner Huh, MD, associate professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, presented these findings at The Society for Gynecologic Oncologists’ 2010 Annual Meeting on Women’s Cancer in San Francisco. Although the HPV4 (Merck, Gardisil) has been shown to prevent cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN), vulvar intraepithelial neoplasia, vaginal intraepithelial neoplasia, genital warts and adenocarcinoma, it is unclear if the vaccine may benefit patients who have already been exposed to the virus and had subsequent surgery. Researchers analyzed data from 17,622 women who were randomly assigned to the HPV4 or placebo. Overall, 587 women assigned to the vaccine and 763 assigned to placebo underwent cervical definitive therapy. Patients in the placebo group were at higher risk for incidence of CIN, vulvar intraepithelial neoplasia, vaginal intraepithelial neoplasia, genital warts and adenocarcinoma at a rate of 11.1 per 100 person-years, with an average of 1.4 years after surgery, compared with patients assigned to HPV4. Regardless of causal HPV type, patients who were vaccinated had a reduced risk for developing further disease, with a rate of 45% (95% CI, 21-62). Women treated for vulvar intraepithelial neoplasia, vaginal intraepithelial neoplasia and genital warts assigned to placebo had the highest risk for further disease, with a rate of 33.7 per 100 person-years. The risk for further [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-03-17T20:02:24-07:00March, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Lymphedema common in head and neck cancer

Source: www.medpagetoday.com Author: Charles Bankhead, Staff Writer, MedPage Today Treatment of head and neck cancer causes potentially severe lymphedema, which responds to complete decongestive therapy in most cases, a retrospective chart review showed. The most severe lymphedema occurred in patients treated with surgery and radiation therapy, followed by definitive surgery alone. Complete decongestive therapy led to clinical improvement in a majority of the patients, including 83% of those treated with surgery alone. "Lymphedema is vastly under-recognized and under-reported in patients with head and neck cancer," Jan S. Lewin, PhD, of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said in an interview at the Multidisciplinary Head and Neck Cancer Symposium (MHNCS). "The lymphedema can be just as severe as what's seen after treatment of breast and other types of cancer. Lymphedema in patients with head and neck cancer can be terribly disfiguring and cause severe functional problems." "Complete decongestive therapy leads to clinically significant improvement in most patients, whether it's performed in a clinic or at home," she added. Available evidence suggests that fewer than half of patients with head and neck cancer develop lymphedema after treatment. However, cosmetic and functional sequelae can be severe, including problems with speaking, eating, airway obstruction, and drooling, as well as self-image. As compared with lymphedema in other cancers, a paucity of information exists about the presentation and treatment of the condition in patients with head and neck cancer, said Lewin. In an effort to add to the information base, she and her colleagues retrospectively reviewed [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-03-13T12:45:20-07:00March, 2010|Oral Cancer News|