3/22/2007 web-based article John G. Spangler, M.D. ABC News (abcnews.go.com) Smokeless is not harmless. That's the latest news on tobacco use, according to a new study published in the international journal Tobacco Control. American Cancer Society epidemiologists Jane Henley and colleagues followed a group of 116,395 men who switched from cigarettes to smokeless tobacco and compared them with 111,952 men who quit using tobacco entirely between 1982 and 2002. Compared with the total quitters, there was an 8 percent increase in death from any cause in the "switcher" group. Worse, there was a 46 percent increase in lung cancer, a 13 percent increase in heart disease, and a 24 percent increase in stroke in the group that switched to smokeless tobacco. An Unhealthy Alternative Smokeless tobacco, also known as spit tobacco, comes in several varieties, mainly chewing tobacco and snuff. While the use of smokeless tobacco had been declining in the United States during the late 1990s, it increased from 9.8 million users to 10.4 million users between 2004 and 2005, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Agency. The increase was greatest among adults 26 years and older — about 6 percent in that group. Why might this be happening? One likely explanation is that adult smokers have switched from cigarettes to smokeless tobacco as a means to quit smoking. Previous studies had suggested that smokeless tobacco increased heart disease death rates among users, but there was some remaining uncertainty about this relationship. According to the authors, [...]

3/19/2007 web-based article press release MidWest Dental Approximately 34,000 people in the United States will be newly diagnosed with oral cancer in 2007. When discovered early, oral cancers have an 80 to 90% cure rate. Unfortunately, the majority of oral cancer is found at its late stage, and accounts for a very high death rate. For these reasons, Midwest Dental is committed to the fight against oral cancer. During the month of April, Midwest Dental will be donating $20 of each oral cancer screening to The Oral Cancer Foundation (www.oralcancer.org). Midwest Dental doctors will offer ViziLite Plus, an FDA approved oral cancer screening tool. ViziLite Plus is a quick and painless exam. The patient uses a rinse to dry the tissue in the mouth. Using a special glow stick, the dentist looks for abnormalities. Anything that is abnormal appears white, while healthy tissue absorbs the light and appears dark. “Midwest Dental is dedicated to oral cancer awareness and recognizes that early detection is the key to reducing the mortality rate associated with this disease,” said Dr. Jeffrey Moos, CEO of Midwest Dental. “We are proud to provide oral cancer screenings to our patients.” As with other types of cancer, age is the primary risk factor for oral cancer, with 95 percent of oral cancer victims being 40 and older. However, this historical demographic of patients is changing, and young, non smoking people between 20 and 50 are the fastest growing segment of the oral cancer population. All adults age 18 [...]

3/19/2007 web-based article Donald Dorsey News-Press (www.newspress.com) Sox, Twins talk about breaking tobacco habit Terry Francona has been feeling grumpy this spring training in Southwest Florida, and Ron Gardenhire knows how he feels. The two baseball managers, Francona of the Boston Red Sox and Gardenhire of the Minnesota Twins, used to have a highly addictive habit, one that used to go hand-in-hand with their sport. Both managers, whose teams train in Fort Myers, used to use smokeless chewing tobacco, also known as dip, spit or chew. The nicotine in it traps users into craving it, and the habit can lead to tooth decay, cavities, gum disease, heart problems, precancerous mouth sores and oral cancer, said Dr. Herb Severson, who studies the issue for the Oregon Research Institute. Trying to stop spitting tobacco results in intense cravings, increased appetite, irritability and depressed moods, he said. "The addiction is not just the physical addiction to the nicotine," Severson said. "They really believe that it improves their performance, relaxes them and gives them other benefits. It's been conditioned to be a part of baseball, and it's a tough addiction to overcome." About 30 percent of big leaguers use spit tobacco these days, Severson said. That number has fallen from a peak of 46 percent in 1987. Drug education programs, public sentiment, stories of mouth cancer and a ban on chewing tobacco at all minor-league levels have all contributed to falling numbers of chewing tobacco users in baseball, Severson said. "My daughter came home [...]

3/18/2007 New York, NY Michelle Rizzo Reuters (uk.reuters.com) Vitamin C from dietary sources, but not from supplements, is associated with a reduced risk of oral pre-malignant lesions in men, a new study indicates. Dr. Nancy Nairi Maserejian, of New England Research Institutes, Watertown, Massachusetts, and colleagues examined intake of vitamins C, E, A and carotenoids in 42,340 men enrolled in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study and the occurrence of oral pre-malignant lesions. The men provided information on supplement use and diet every 2 to 4 years. A total of 207 oral premalignant lesions were diagnosed between 1986 and 2002, the team reports in the International Journal of Cancer. The risk of developing such a lesion was not significantly linked to total intake of vitamin C, vitamin A, or carotenoids. However, dietary vitamin C was significantly associated with a reduced risk of oral premalignant lesions: those with the highest intake had a 50 percent reduction in risk compared to those with the lowest intake. The researchers found no clear relationship with beta-carotene, lycopene, or lutein/zeaxanthin. A trend for increased risk of oral pre-malignant lesions was observed with vitamin E, especially among current smokers and with vitamin E supplements. Beta-carotene also increased the risk among current smokers. "It is possible that the protection that seems to be offered by dietary intake of vitamin C is actually partly due to some other component of vitamin C-rich food," Maserejian said in an interview with Reuters Health. "Although we do not yet know exactly what [...]

3/18/2007 Washington, D.C. Reviewed by Bryan Burrough Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com) Book Review of THE CIGARETTE CENTURY: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of The Product That Defined America written by Allan M. Brandt Recent years have seen a flurry of what might be called "inanimate" biographies -- that is, books devoted to the life of a thing rather than a person. Salt got one, cod, too, even some naughty words. While I admire the scholarship that goes into these studies, they tend to leave me a bit flat. I mean, it's the rare cod that battled the Boers alongside Winston Churchill or ate fried eggs off Ava Gardner's chest. And while I love a heaping spoon of Morton's as much as the next guy, no matter how you shake it, salt will simply never own up to losing its virginity to the upstairs maid. By their very nature, these books can come off as bloodless digests of minutiae. Given a choice between Kitty Kelley's latest and A Brief History of the Booger, I'd hold my nose and pick the Kelley. You'd have to. Next up: the cigarette. In The Cigarette Century, Allan M. Brandt, a Harvard Medical School professor with a very long and impressive job title, does a nice job of putting Kools and Salems on the couch. The tobacco industry has become well-worn territory for authors and journalists, but Brandt, an expert witness in a number of anti-tobacco lawsuits, enlivens a familiar story by scanning with the widest [...]

3/15/2007 press release from American Academy of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery Newswise www.newswise.com Efforts to improve the quality of life in patients recovering from head and neck cancer would be vastly improved by participation in support group activities, according to a new study published in the March 2007 issue of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery. The study, which administered quality-of-life (QOL) surveys to 47 patients who had previously undergone treatment for head and neck cancer, determined that support group participants experienced scores significantly better in the areas of eating, emotion, and pain, compared with participants who did not attend support groups. As a result of these findings, the study’s authors suggest that support group therapy should be included in regular therapy for head and neck cancer patients. The study’s authors administered the University of Michigan Head and Neck Quality of Life survey, which covers four different categories: head and neck pain, eating and swallowing, communication, and emotional well being. Participants in the support group took part in hour-and-a-half long biweekly multidisciplinary sessions over the course of a year. Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery is the official scientific journal of the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (AAO-HNS). The study’s authors are Kalpesh T. Vakharia, MD; M. Jafer Ali, MD; and Steven J. Wang, MD. They are all part of the Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery at the University of California-San Francisco. About the AAO-HNS The American Academy of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck [...]

3/15/2007 Nome, Alaska Diana Hacker AFP It was the kind of victory that only comes true in fairy tales. A cancer survivor nobody thought could win beat the big guys in the grueling 1,100-mile (1,800-kilometer) Iditarod Sled Dog Race. And he did it on his sixth attempt wearing the same bib number -- lucky 13 -- that his father and brother wore when they won the Last Great Race on their sixth attempts. With a frostbitten finger wrapped in toilet paper and duct tape to dull the throbbing, Lance Mackey bounded behind his smartly trotting dog team as they passed under the burled-arch finish line in Nome, Alaska, with a winning time of nine days, five hours, eight minutes and 41 seconds at 8:08 pm Tuesday (0408 GMT Wednesday). "Unreal," he kept saying as he punched his fists into the sky, pounded the bib on his chest and hugged family members and well-wishers. "This is a dream I've been living since I was a little boy and my dad won the race," Mackey told a cheering crowd as the setting sun glistened on the Gold Rush City. "Mission accomplished." Mackey, 36, camped out for more than a week outside of Iditarod headquarters last summer so he would be first in line to pick his bib number. He was hoping that lucky number 13 would give him a bit of an edge against the gang of four past Iditarod champs who were initially considered the only real contenders. "I was ready, [...]

3/14/2007 Park City, UT press release PR Inside (www.prinside.com) BSD Medical Corporation announced today that it is sponsoring a cancer therapy roundtable March 16-18 in Park City, Utah dedicated to advancement of the utilization of hyperthermia therapy in treating cancer. Attending the summit meetings will be physicians and physicists from U.S. cancer treatment centers, including leading institutions such as Northwestern University Medical School (represented by Northwestern Memorial Hospital, its primary teaching hospital), Duke University Medical Center, the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Mark Hurwitz of Harvard Medical School will act as chairman. The Park City roundtable is being conducted simultaneously with the annual conference of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) being held in Hollywood, Florida March 14-18. A report is scheduled to be presented at the NCCN conference regarding the inclusion of hyperthermia therapy and radiation as combination treatments in the NCCN 2007 Breast Cancer Guidelines for recurrent cancer of the chest wall (breast cancer), as well as other localized cancer recurrences. NCCN, a non-profit alliance of 20 of the world's top cancer centers, issues Clinical Guidelines in Oncology, the recognized standard for clinical policy in the oncology community. This announcement significantly supports the progressive emergence of hyperthermia as a mainline therapy in the treatment of cancer, and the institutions represented at the Park City summit played a major role in the inclusion of hyperthermia therapy in the new NCCN guidelines. This year attendees at the Park City Summit will focus primarily [...]

3/14/2007 web-based article staff ComputerWorld (www.computerworld.com) A project that allows the public to donate idle computer time to a grid computing system is helping scientists more quickly solve complex medical problems. For example, the World Community Grid has helped researchers dramatically speed efforts to develop new drugs to treat HIV and to identify new treatment paths for people with several different types of cancer. IBM launched the community grid in late 2004 to allow computer users worldwide to donate idle computer processing power to a grid tasked with performing medical research. Since then, its users have donated the equivalent of more than 78,000 years of research time, according to IBM. The grid today includes 265,000 members and 530,000 devices. It has helped researchers compile about 60 million research equations, officials said. The Help Defeat Cancer project has used the grid to help build a massive public database of tissue samples that eventually will be used like a national fingerprint registry to get more accurate diagnoses from biopsies. David Foran, professor of pathology and radiology and director of the Center for Biomedical Imaging at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), said the effort has already created the "gold standard of databases" for breast, head and neck, and colon cancer. The project aims to eventually use the database to diagnose cancer and to plan the best course of treatment for patients, said Foran, who is leading the project. In addition to the tissue images, the database stores comprehensive [...]

3/14/2007 New York, NY Matthew Perrone Forbes.com Wall Street sees limited short-term potential for an innovative breast cancer treatment from GlaxoSmithKline PLC that gained U.S. regulatory approval Tuesday. Longer term, however, some analysts say the drug could reach blockbuster status. The Food and Drug Administration approved British drug maker's Tykerb, for use alongside Roche's chemotherapy Xeloda, in patients with advanced breast cancer who fail to respond to other treatments. The drug is part of an emerging group of therapies that target cancerous cells. The therapies differ from chemotherapy, which indiscriminately attacks both healthy and cancerous cells. A study published last year showed that once-a-day pill Tykerb, in combination with Xeloda, slowed tumor growth among patients who didn't respond to the premier targeted breast cancer drug now on the market, Genentech Inc.'s Herceptin. Because Glaxo's drug will initially be aimed at a relatively small population that includes just 28,000 patients annually, analysts are not expecting substantial revenues in 2007. Goldman Sachs analyst Mick Readey said in an interview that approval of the drug will offer more "positive sentiment than commercial opportunity" for Glaxo in the short term. Goldman Sachs did not include profits from the drug in a valuation of the company published last week, and downgraded the stock, telling investors it would be a good time to sell after any stock gains triggered by the approval of Tykerb. Goldman and other investment houses are leery of the large number of Glaxo patents expected to expire in the near future, including [...]