7/21/2006 Appleton, WI Wendy Harris Post Crescent (www.postcrescent.com) What seemed like your average winter sore throat eventually gave Janelle Zempel the shock of her life. She had cancer in her neck. “I thought that was it,” said Zempel, now 57, who figured she’d just be given a death sentence in the spring of 2003 when her persistent sore throat by then had grown into a door knob-sized tumor. By the time she arrived at Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee for treatment, doctors gave her hope that she could survive. But the initial plan they offered was horrendous. “They told me they’d have to (operate on) my larynx, the jugular vein on the left side of my neck, my esophagus, and another vein in my shoulder,” said Zempel, of Fremont. “And I’d have to have a feeding tube for a year until they could reconstruct my esophagus.” And then they gave her another option — a new diagnostic and treatment approach that was being tested by Dr. Dian Wang, assistant professor of radiation oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, who practices at Froedtert. Wang was conducting a study involving head and neck cancer patients that used combined images from PET and CT scans to more accurately visualize tumors, and then attack them with a very precise form of radiation, called intensity-modulated radiation therapy. Traditionally, CT scans — an X-ray test that takes pictures of thin slices of the body, are used for seeing tumors. A PET scan, meanwhile, uses a short-lived [...]

7/21/2006 Austin, TX staff www.news8austin.com Oral cancer is the sixth most common cancer in the U.S. The survival rate of oral cancer is lower than that of cervical cancer, Hodgkin's disease, cancer of the brain, liver, testes, kidneys and skin. It is the cause of nearly 8,000 deaths a year in the U.S. That means one patient dies from oral cancer every hour. Worldwide, oral cancer can affect 350,000 annually. Smoking and other tobacco use are associated with 70 to 80 percent of oral cancer cases. Men are affected twice as often as women, particularly men older than age 40. Other than the lips, the most common areas for oral cancer are on the tongue and floor of the mouth. Oral cancer is particularly dangerous because it has a high risk of producing second, primary tumors. Early detection is the key. The mortality rate of this cancer is high because it's often discovered too late in development. Cancer is diagnosed in stages I-IV. Detection of an oral cancer in stage I will carry a likely prognosis of an 80 percent survival rate. However, the same lesion, if progressed to stage III, will carry a 20 percent survival rate. Despite numerous advances in treatment, oral squamous cell carcinoma has just an approximately 50% at five-years from diagnosis survival rate, which is the worst of all cancer death rates. The five-year survival rate has not improved in the last three decades. Currently, the most definitive procedure to detect oral cancer involves a [...]

7/19/2006 Indianapolis, IN staff The Indianapolis Star (Indystar.com) Dr. Stephen J. Jay, chair of the Indiana University School of Medicine's Department of Public Health, discusses smokeless tobacco products. Question: What are smokeless tobacco products? Answer: They come in lots of different forms, such as chewing tobacco, but it's basically putting tobacco in your mouth and absorbing nicotine and lots of different chemicals into your body instead of inhaling them. You don't generate any smoke. We used to refer to this as "spit tobacco," since one of the things you do when you use it is you spit. But some newer products don't require you to do that. Q: Are smokeless tobacco products better for you than cigarettes? A: They're highly addicting. And the companies don't have to adhere to any standards or regulations because there are none for these products, so the consumer really has no idea what is in the product. What you do when you use smokeless tobacco is you just trade your cancer. Instead of getting lung cancer, you get cancers of the lip, tongue, and head and neck cancers, which are just horrible cancers. The disfiguration and surgical procedures needed to treat many of these tumors are just terrible. You have other problems, some of which you also have with smoking, like periodontal disease, dental diseases of gum, including tooth decay and tooth loss. Q: How about Taboka, the new spitless tobacco that's being tested in Indianapolis? A: We have no scientific evidence that I'm aware [...]

7/19/2006 Bristol, United Kingdom Anna A. Davies et al. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 98, No. 14, 961-973, July 19, 2006 Background: Dietary modifications and supplements are used widely by patients with cancer and preinvasive lesions as an adjunct to standard treatment. Given the widespread use of nutritional modifications and supplements by such patients and concerns about the lack of benefit and possible harm, we conducted a systematic review of randomized controlled trials to examine the effect of nutritional interventions on patients with cancer or preinvasive lesions. Methods: We searched electronic databases and reference lists to locate all eligible trials and analyzed trial quality. Outcome measures were all-cause and cancer mortality, disease-free survival, cancer recurrence, second primary cancer, recurrence of a preinvasive lesion, or progression to cancer. Results of individual trials were combined by use of random-effects meta-analyses. Results: We identified 59 eligible trials, 25 in patients with cancer and 34 in patients with preinvasive lesions, respectively. Trial quality was generally low; only three trials (two of cancer and one of preinvasive lesions) had adequate methods for generating the allocation sequence, allocation concealment, and masking both outcome assessors and participants. The combined odds ratio (OR) for the effect of a healthy diet—given alone or with dietary supplements, weight loss, or exercise—on all-cause mortality was 0.90 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.46 to 1.77). There was no evidence of an association between the use of antioxidant (OR = 1.01, 95% CI = 0.88 to 1.15) or retinol (OR = [...]

7/19/2006 San Francisco, CA staff Biocompare.com Researchers have discovered a potent inhibitor of the human papilloma viruses (HPV), particularly those types that cause cervical cancer and genital warts, according to a study published in PLoS Pathogens. The inhibitor is found in commercially available products, including sexual lubricants and baby food. In laboratory tests, carrageenan, a compound derived from red algae, prevented HPV infection by both genital wart and cancer-causing types. "We were floored by how much better it worked than anything else we have tested. It's effective at 100-fold lower concentration than the next best inhibitor we've found," said Dr. John Schiller, senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute. Normally, HPV attacks cells by attaching to proteins on their surface and then chemically manipulating access to the cells. Carrageenan thwarts this process by attaching to HPV and preventing its entry into cells. Christopher Buck, lead author of the study and post-doctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute, searched for candidate inhibitory compounds by looking for substances that were structurally similar to a key cell surface component involved in HPV infection. "When carrageenan came up to be the clear winner, Chris started to search for products that might contain it," said Schiller. "It quickly became clear that it is widely used as a thickening agent in many foods and topically applied products. So he decided to search for sexual lubricants that might contain it as the gelling agent and came up with several. Although carrageenan was identified in a systematic screen, [...]

7/19/2006 Plantation, FL press release biz.yahoo.com CIGNA Dental today announced the expansion of its DHMO product suite to include a new series of schedules that highlight the importance of preventive care and wellness through a new split copay differential, oral cancer detection offerings, greater access to dental sealants, and more. "These DHMO plan enhancements are part of the overall broad product suite that we offer our employer customers. In fact, we are experiencing increased employer interest in adding DHMO to their plan offerings as another cost savings approach," says Rebekah Whitehouse, chief marketing officer of CIGNA Dental. The CIGNA Dental Care 06 Patient Charge Schedules (PCS), effective August 1, 2006, include procedures and copays that build upon its flexible and innovative dental plan offerings, giving CIGNA one of the most extensive national DHMO product lines. "With rising health care costs, employers are looking for ways to manage benefit expenses while maintaining healthy and productive employees," added Whitehouse. "Through wellness and cost savings features, these new plans provide a cost-effective option for employers and employees. The 06 Plans provide flexibility while focusing on comprehensive coverage and the importance of preventive care." Studies show that preventive dental care can help members avoid paying more money in the long-term for restorative and emergency treatment. This new product series offers members coverage for a wide range of dental services, with most preventive services covered at no or low cost. "Structuring dental plans that encourage use of preventive dental care supports our mission to provide [...]

7/17/2006 Houston, TX Juan A. Lozano Chron.com Knees bent and hands above his head, Francis Maloy lay on his back on a narrow, metallic table inside a white chamber, waiting for a giant wheel-like device to bombard the tumor in his chest with protons. "I had never heard of proton therapy. The last time I heard about protons I was in college taking physics," said Maloy, a 68-year-old retired Army colonel from Stuart, Fla., just before the procedure. Maloy, who has advanced lung cancer, is one of the first patients being treated at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center's new $125 million Proton Therapy Center. It is the largest of the nation's four such facilities that treat cancer by targeting protons narrowly on the tumor itself, sparing the healthy tissue that with traditional X-ray radiation therapy is blasted along with the cancer cells. From inside one of five treatment rooms in the 94,000 square-foot center, the gantry looks like the airlock of a science-fiction spaceship. But behind it sits the bending magnets, electrical wires and monitors that make up the gantry, encased in a steel barrel, three stories tall and weighing 190 tons. The protons, which are stripped from the nucleus of hydrogen atoms in a tubular device called an injector, are sent to a compact particle accelerator — actually a ring of magnets about 20 feet in diameter — called a synchrotron. There they circle around until they gather enough energy to irradiate a tumor before being [...]

7/17/2006 Fort Worth, TX Bob Ray Sanders StarTelegram.com A 75-year-old Fort Worth man is the Billy Graham of the anti-smoking crusade. When Jerry Berkowitz finishes talking to schoolchildren, they start coming down the aisles to testify -- to ask questions and, in some cases, to give him something he gave up 25 years ago. At his home the other day, he recalled his first speech. It was to more than 300 students at Aledo Middle School. The youngsters were seated on the gymnasium floor, and as Berkowitz prepared to address them, he remembered administrators' warnings that the kids likely would be a little restless, partly because it was the last period of the day. But as soon as he began to speak, sounding somewhat like a robot from a science fiction movie, the kids were mesmerized, he said. At the end of his 25-minute presentation, "a little kid about this tall [just over waist high] handed me a pack of Marlboros and said, 'Hey, mister, take this away from me. I'll never smoke again, I promise.' " Soon afterward at a similar event, a young girl approached him. He had noticed her on the front row, staring straight at him during the entire speech. The girl was deaf, Berkowitz learned, and she had been reading his lips. "She handed me a brand of cigarettes I had never seen before and said, 'I've been trying to quit for years.' And I burst out crying," Berkowitz said as tears welled in his [...]

7/17/2006 Long Beach, CA Phillip Zonkel Long Beach PressTelegram.com Sabrina Mansfield is receiving her final hyperthermia treatment a therapy designed to kill her aggressive and recurrent cancer. She has seven catheters in her neck and head. Each one beams microwave energy to heat a precise location of her cancer-riddled tissue. When this heating is combined with radiation or chemotherapy, it increases the success rate of these therapies for eradicating cancer cells, according to recent research. "We needed to be extremely aggressive with Sabrina's treatment," says Dr. Behrooz Hakimian, Mansfield's radiation oncologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, who recommended the combination therapy. "She probably had one chance of treatment at this point. I wanted her to have the best treatment." Mansfield received her treatment from Dr. Nisar Syed, director of radiation oncology at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, who is considered a leader in the field of hyperthermia. Syed has been administering the procedure for more than 22 years and has treated more than 3,000 patients. Of Syed's patients, he says approximately 25 percent had recurrent cancer after treatment. "Dr. Syed has the most experience in Southern California, if not on the West Coast, in using hyperthermia," Hakimian says. "He's magical with his hands." Hyperthermia works on selected cancers: head and neck, tongue, throat, cervix, prostate, melanoma, sarcoma and breast cancer on the chest wall. They can be locally advanced tumors that have not metastasized or recurrent cancers that have been treated with surgery, chemotherapy and/or radiation. Sixty-five percent of Syed's patients [...]

7/15/2006 Viena, Austria Clemens Klug et al. Laryngoscope, July 1, 2006; 116(7): 1162-1167 Objective/Hypotheses: The aim of this retrospective cohort study was to investigate the effect of prior radiotherapy (XRT) on the outcome of microvascular free tissue transfer in the head and neck region. Methods: Four hundred fifty-five patients, subdivided into three groups, were analyzed. Groups I (no previous XRT, n = 110), II (previous radiochemotherapy with 50 Gy focus dosage in the primary treatment regime for oral cancer, n = 322), and III (secondary reconstruction after XRT-induced complications, n = 23) were compared regarding flap success rate, postoperative complications, postoperative mortality, duration of intensive care (DOIC), and hospitalization (DOH). Results: Flap success did not differ significantly across groups (I: 95.5%, II: 93.2%, III: 91.3%. Risk of postoperative complications was significantly lower for group I (12.7%) compared with groups II (23.9%) and III (39.1%). DOIC and DOH were significantly shorter for patients in group I than for those in groups II and III. Conclusions: XRT before free tissue transfer does not significantly increase flap loss or postoperative mortality but does increase postoperative complications and length of hospitalization. Authors: Clemens Klug, Dominik Berzaczy, Heidrun Reinbacher, Martin Voracek, Thomas Rath, Werner Millesi, and Rolf Ewers Authors' affiliations: From the Hospital of Cranio-Maxillofacial and Oral Surgery (c.k., d.b., h.r., r.e.), Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria; the School of Psychology (m.v.), University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria; the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (t.r.), Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria; and the Department [...]