Oral Cancer News

Other ailments can affect survival of head and neck cancer

Source: record.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, said Jay Piccirillo, M.D., a head and neck specialist at the School of Medicine, 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 coexisting conditions or comorbidities, Piccirillo said. In a recent study, Piccirillo, professor of otolaryngology and director of the Clinical Outcomes Research Office at the School of Medicine, showed that the risk of death increased up to sevenfold when patients with head and neck cancer developed new or more severe coexisting 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 said. "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 survive their cancers." Some past studies of [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-12-12T10:59:26-07:00December, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Help requested to research early oral cancer detection

Source: British Dental Journal 205, 586 (2008) Author: staff A research group at the University of Sheffield are inviting dentists to participate in a study investigating how general dental practitioners working in primary care screen and refer suspicious oral soft tissue lesions. Professor Paul Speight, Dr Sarah Baker and Paul Brocklehurst from the School of Clinical Dentistry in Sheffield are investigating the cues or factors which GDPs take into account when deciding whether or not to refer a lesion to secondary care. The information will be used to prepare guidelines which may result in more rapid referral of appropriate lesions. Oral cancer affects almost 4,500 Britons every year and 50% of these will die of their disease. The team say that the main reason for this high mortality is that many patients present to secondary care with large lesions, when it is already too late to initiate curative treatment. There are many reasons for delay in presentation, but one possible reason is that lesions are not identified and referred to hospital specialists. Colleagues are invited to participate in this study by completing a short web-based questionnaire, which comprises ten clinical cases histories. The task is to decide which of the lesions practitioners would refer and to record the factors that influenced the decision. Full details of the project and access to the questionnaire can be found on http://www.oralcancerscreening.com.

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-12-12T08:11:28-07:00December, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Robotic tongue cancer surgery

Source: kaaltv.com Author: staff Fighting cancer is not easy. Chemotherapy, radiation and surgery can be very hard on your body. Take head and neck cancers, for example. These tumors are often hard to reach. Doctors have to cut through bones such as your jaw to reach them. Now, doctors at Mayo Clinic are using robots to access these cancers leaving face bones intact. Roger Combs may be having a tough time beating his wife Gloria at a game of gin rummy. But he's winning a much tougher battle; a fight against cancer that formed at the base of his tongue. "I really didn't feel badly. I had some difficulty swallowing," he says. Roger's doctors told him the cancer had to be removed. "But the tongue and tonsillar area is a very hard area to get to," says Dr. Eric Moore. Dr. Moore says traditional surgery often involves splitting the jawbone open to access the tumor. "And obviously that's disfiguring, interferes with speech and swallowing and it takes a lot of time to recover, " he says. So instead, Dr. Moore used a robot to remove Roger's cancer. The operation involves lowering the robotic equipment through Roger's mouth to the site of the tumor. While seated at a control panel Dr. Moore then guides the robot as it removes the cancer without damaging surrounding structures. After Roger healed from the operation, he went through radiation and chemotherapy - both of which were not easy. "We've had some ups and downs as [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-12-11T13:29:12-07:00December, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Oral cancer patients could be diagnosed earlier, study suggests

Source: www.sciencedaily.com Author: staff Worldwide, more than 500,000 new cases of cancer of the mouth are diagnosed each year. The majority of these cancers are found too late, causing many people to die within five years of finding out they have cancer. There exists much information addressing issues related to the patient who has undergone surgery or chemotherapy but little information related to early diagnosis and referral. A new article in the Journal of Prosthodontics describes the epidemiology of oral cancer and the diagnostic tools currently available to prosthodontists to ensure that their patients are diagnosed at the earliest possible time. Although the need for prosthodontics was expected to decline with the promotion of preventive measures, it is actually increasing with the aging population. The highest risk of developing oral cancer is in adults over 40 who use both tobacco and alcohol. However, these cancers can develop in anyone, so annual prosthodontist visits are increasingly important. The majority of oral, head and neck cancer are initially diagnosed in a late stage, which has a five year prognosis of less than 50 percent. If these tumors are found in their earliest stage, the five year prognosis is 95 percent. All dentists, including prosthodontists, are specifically trained to detect these tumors in an early stage. Only 28 percent of patients reported ever having had an oral cancer examination. Patients who have lost their teeth must be specifically counseled about returning for prescribed, regular recall examinations. They may wrongly think that, as they [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-12-11T09:46:03-07:00December, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Cancer to be world’s top killer by 2010, WHO says

Source: news.myway.com Author: Mike Stobbe Cancer will overtake heart disease as the world's top killer by 2010, part of a trend that should more than double global cancer cases and deaths by 2030, international health experts said in a report released Tuesday. Rising tobacco use in developing countries is believed to be a huge reason for the shift, particularly in China and India, where 40 percent of the world's smokers now live. So is better diagnosing of cancer, along with the downward trend in infectious diseases that used to be the world's leading killers. Cancer diagnoses around the world have steadily been rising and are expected to hit 12 million this year. Global cancer deaths are expected to reach 7 million, according to the new report by the World Health Organization. An annual rise of 1 percent in cases and deaths is expected - with even larger increases in China, Russia and India. That means new cancer cases will likely mushroom to 27 million annually by 2030, with deaths hitting 17 million. Underlying all this is an expected expansion of the world's population - there will be more people around to get cancer. By 2030, there could be 75 million people living with cancer around the world, a number that many health care systems are not equipped to handle. "This is going to present an amazing problem at every level in every society worldwide," said Peter Boyle, director of the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer. Boyle spoke at [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-12-09T12:05:31-07:00December, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Type of alcoholic beverage and risk of head and neck cancer—a pooled analysis within the INHANCE consortium

Source: American Journal of Epidemiology, doi:10.1093/aje/kwn306 Authors: Mark P. Purdue et al. The authors pooled data from 15 case-control studies of head and neck cancer (9,107 cases, 14,219 controls) to investigate the independent associations with consumption of beer, wine, and liquor. In particular, they calculated associations with different measures of beverage consumption separately for subjects who drank beer only (858 cases, 986 controls), for liquor-only drinkers (499 cases, 527 controls), and for wine-only drinkers (1,021 cases, 2,460 controls), with alcohol never drinkers (1,124 cases, 3,487 controls) used as a common reference group. The authors observed similar associations with ethanol-standardized consumption frequency for beer-only drinkers (odds ratios (ORs) = 1.6, 1.9, 2.2, and 5.4 for ≤5, 6–15, 16–30, and >30 drinks per week, respectively; Ptrend

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-12-09T07:41:39-07:00December, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

‘Mama!’ First word of boy with tongue built out of his tummy muscles

Source: www.dailymail.co.uk/health Author: Angela Epstein A child's first words are memorable for any parent. But when Daniel Sewell said 'mama' for the first time, his parents had more reason than most to rejoice. Just 12 weeks earlier, their then 19-month-old son had undergone pioneering surgery to rebuild his tongue after first having an operation to remove a cancerous tumour. The family had been warned he might never be able to speak. So Daniel's first word was a monumental achievement. 'I just couldn't believe it,' says his mother Alison. 'That single word meant there was hope that the horrors of the previous months might finally be behind us.' Daniel Sewell and mum Alison Nearly 5,000 people are diagnosed with mouth cancer annually. While other cancers have seen a drop in mortality rates, those for mouth cancer have remained at more than 1,500 deaths a year for a decade. It is often triggered by smoking and drinking - alcohol and nicotine damage the mouth lining, causing cell changes - and is almost unheard of in children. So when Daniel, the youngest of the couple's five children, began having trouble sucking on a bottle, cancer was the furthest thing from his parents' mind. 'With the benefit of hindsight, it was clear that something was bothering him,' remembers Alison, 43, a housewife, who lives with her husband Richard, 42 a shop fitter in Crook, County Durham. 'But at the time we just put it down to teething. I'll always feel terribly guilty about that.' [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-12-09T07:15:12-07:00December, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Impact of PET scanning consistent across all cancer types

Source: www.medscape.com Authors: Zosia Chustecka, Désirée Lie, MD Scanning with positron emission tomography (PET) scanning has an impact on the intended management of patients with cancer in approximately one third of cases, and new data suggest that this impact is consistent across all cancer types. The results come from the National Oncologic PET Registry (NOPR), and the latest data are reported in the December issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. "Although the effectiveness of PET may differ somewhat between individual cancers, it's in the same ballpark," says coauthor Barry Siegel, MD, professor of radiology at Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology in St. Louis, Missouri. "This result was a little unexpected, but it leads us to believe that a continual parsing of PET's usefulness, cancer by cancer and indication by indication, for purposes of reimbursement does not make clinical sense." At present in the United States, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) restricts the reimbursement of PET scans for only 9 cancer types. The cancers that are covered include non–small-cell lung cancer, esophageal cancer, colorectal cancer, head and neck cancer, lymphoma and melanoma (all for diagnosis, staging, and restaging), breast cancer (for restaging and treatment monitoring), thyroid cancer (for restaging under very specific circumstances), and cervical cancer (for initial staging if conventional imaging result is negative for extrapelvic metastasis). NOPR was launched in 2006 in response to a proposal from the CMS to expand coverage for PET to other cancers. In this registry, patients are covered under the CMS [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-12-04T12:49:17-07:00December, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Saliva-test pioneer David Wong named to endowed chair in dentistry

Source: www.newsroom.ucla.edu Author: Sandra Shagat The UCLA School of Dentistry has named oral biology professor David Wong, a pioneer in the use of saliva for diagnosing cancer and other diseases, as the first holder of the Felix and Mildred Yip Endowed Professorship in Dentistry. The new chair, created by a $1 million gift from Dr. Felix Yip and his wife, Mildred, will support research on oral and head and neck cancers, an area of particular emphasis at the School of Dentistry. Wong has made major advances in the fight against oral cancer, having developed with colleagues the first standardized saliva-based test for the disease. His ongoing research in saliva diagnostics has helped build UCLA's reputation as a center for excellence in oral fluid research. "Felix and Mildred Yip are visionary donors who saw an opportunity to help advance a promising area of scientific research that ultimately could save lives," said No-Hee Park, dean of the UCLA School of Dentistry. "Their generous gift supports our efforts to make salivary diagnostics a new clinical paradigm for disease detection." The Yips are noted philanthropists within the Asian American community in Southern California and have been generous supporters of UCLA and the School of Dentistry. They are among a small group of Chinese-American philanthropists who have established chairs at UCLA. Felix Yip has served as a member of the School of Dentistry's board of counselors since 2003, and since 2002, the Yips have funded a scholarship program at the school that enables foreign scholars [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-12-02T14:11:07-07:00December, 2008|Oral Cancer News|

Cetuximab approved for first-line treatment of head and neck cancer in Europe

Source: www.docguide.com Author: staff The European Commission has approved a new indication for the use of cetuximab (Erbitux) to include first-line treatment of patients with recurrent and/or metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck. The approval is based primarily upon the results of the Erbitux in First-Line Treatment of Recurrent or Metastatic Head and Neck Cancer (EXTREME) study, published in the September issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The EXTREME study established that adding cetuximab to platinum-based chemotherapy significantly prolonged median overall and progression-free survival, and also significantly increased response rate. Patients treated with cetuximab plus chemotherapy experienced the following improvements, compared with chemotherapy alone: · Median overall survival increase of nearly 3 months (10.1 vs 7.4 months; P = .04), equating to a 20% reduction in the risk of death (hazard ratio [HR]: 0.80) during the study period · 70% increase in median progression-free survival (5.6 vs 3.3 months; P < .001) · 80% relative increase in response rate (36% vs 20%; P < .001) The most commonly reported side effect with cetuximab is an acne-like skin rash that seems to be correlated with a good response to therapy. In approximately 5% of patients, hypersensitivity reactions may occur during treatment with cetuximab; about half of these reactions are severe. Note: 1. Source: Merck

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2008-12-01T18:50:38-07:00December, 2008|Oral Cancer News|