9/10/2002 Yorkshire, UK BBC News The government is being urged to review cancer care services after a man suffering from oral cancer was misdiagnosed by different doctors on 19 separate occasions. Father-of-three Steve Harley, 41, now faces a far tougher fight against the disease because the tumour has spread. Whereas doctors might have been able to remove the cancer if he had been diagnosed earlier, it is currently inoperable, and specialists are using chemotherapy to try to shrink it before trying surgery. Mr Harley is now facing an intensive seven-week course of radiotherapy. If that fails, he faces losing his tongue, larynx and voice box - and his overall chances of survival are far lower. Mr Harley's MP, Eric Illsley, warned the government in the House of Commons on Wednesday that Mr Harley's case highlighted serious failings in health provision in England. The businessman, from Barnsley, south Yorkshire, first developed throat pains in July last year. He says he visited his GP, who told him it was probably an infection and sent him home with antibiotics. However, it failed to clear up, and he visited the GP on seven further occasions, each time being told that nothing could be found. He says he was not sent for further investigations despite reporting symptoms that were clear signs that something could be wrong - a persistent and agonising earache in addition to the earlier sore throat. He eventually saw four different GPs, five hospital doctors and three specialists. "I did ask fairly [...]

10/1/2002 Chicago American Dental Association The American Dental Association (ADA) announced yesterday it received a grant of $1.2 million from the National Cancer Institute to develop and implement a continuing education program for oral health care professionals in the fight against oral cancer. "Despite advances in oral cancer treatment, only about half of all persons diagnosed with it survive more than five years," says ADA President Dr. D. Gregory Chadwick. "We want to see those survival numbers go up, and that is why we are so extremely pleased with this award because it will help bring prevention and early detection to the forefront in our battle against oral cancer." The American Cancer Society (ACS) estimates some 28,900 oral cancer cases will occur this year, resulting in 7,400 deaths. Incidence rates are more than twice as high in men as in women and are greatest in men over age 40. Risk factors include cigarette, cigar or pipe smoking, use of smokeless tobacco and excessive consumption of alcohol. However, 25 percent of oral cancer victims do not smoke or have any other known risk factors. The five-year grant will focus on oral cancer prevention, with long-range goals of increasing the number of dentists who counsel at-risk patients about stopping tobacco use, according to principal investigator Dr. Sol Silverman, professor of oral medicine, University of California at San Francisco. Through this program, he added, we also will lay the foundation to increase detection of oral cancer at its earliest, most curable stage. "Initially, [...]

9/1/2002 Bethesda, MD The National Cancer Institute The National Cancer Institute, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, has chosen the Oral Cancer Foundation as a resource to be added to the NCI Fact Sheet, a guide which it provides to the American public, and in particular to those people with cancer and their family members, that lists organizations which provide information and services to those with cancer. “Knowledge is empowering when fighting a killer such as cancer. The NCI has always been the primary source for the dissemination of information regarding all cancers to both professionals and the public, providing timely, unbiased, and accurate information. OCF is proud to have met the criteria established by the NCI for inclusion in its list of resources for patients and families”, said Brian Hill, OCF’s founder and Executive Director. The Oral Cancer Foundation is a non-profit entity created for the purpose of raising the awareness of oral cancer in both the professional and public sectors. Providing information, resources, and support to patients and family members, as well as caregivers, are core goals of the foundation.

8/15/2002 Atlanta Cancer Journal for Clinicians An estimated 28,900 Americans will be diagnosed with oral or pharyngeal cancer and nearly 7,400 will succumb to the disease, according to a review published in the July/August issue of CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, a peer-reviewed journal from the American Cancer Society. This disease most commonly has been found in middle-aged and older individuals, and it has affected more men than women. However, authors Brad W. Neville, DDS, and Terry A. Day, MD, FACS, say that “a disturbing number of these malignancies is being documented in younger adults…[and the] disparity in the male:female ratio has become less pronounced over the past half century, probably because women have been more equally exposing themselves to known oral carcinogens such as tobacco and alcohol.” Along with a review of the epidemiological and clinical features of oral and oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma, Neville and Day emphasize early detection as the best method of prevention. “In spite of the ready accessibility of the oral cavity to direct examination, these malignancies still are often not detected until a late stage, and the survival rate for oral cancer has remained essentially unchanged over the past three decades,” say the authors.

8/14/2002 Berlin Hannah Cleaver Reuters Health A "pacemaker for the tongue" could soon help victims of mouth cancer or accidents to control a reconstructed tongue built from transplanted muscle, animal studies in Germany suggest. Currently, surgeons can fashion replacement tongues from neck muscles for people who lose their tongue to cancer or trauma. The muscles are grafted onto the base of the person's original tongue. But controlling the rebuilt organ, in order to eat and talk, is a major problem and reconstructed tongues need to be kept active to avoid shrinkage through disuse. "The reconstructed tongue initially makes passive movements, which are produced by contractions of the surrounding floor of the mouth as well as pharynx and chewing musculature," said Professor Stephan Remmert, from Luebeck University Hospital, at last week's German Ear, Nose and Throat Conference in Baden-Baden. To give patients better control of the tongue, Remmert is using pacemaker technology to boost nerve signals to the reconstructed organ. He told Reuters Health that the main aim of the work was to filter the most important signals that the brain sends to the main tongue nerve, the hypoglossus. "Then we can amplify the signal and send it on to the new musculature," Remmert said. "It has to be amplified enough to generate quite powerful movements." In experiments on domestic pigs, the group is surrounding the severed end of the hypoglossus with electrodes to measure, reproduce and send its signals. Much of the other technology needed has already been developed, or [...]

8/13/2002 Bombay, India Amy Waldman Tata Memorial Hospital Promoted by a slick and many-tentacled advertising campaign, gutka, an indigenous form of smokeless tobacco, has become a fixture in the mouths of millions of Indians over the last two decades. It has spread through the subcontinent, and even to South Asians in England. But what has prompted particular concern here is the way that in the last 10 years, gutka - as portable as chewing gum and sometimes as sweet as candy - has found its way into the mouths of Indian children. Young people have become gutka consumers in large numbers, and they have become an alarming avant-garde in what doctors say is an oral cancer epidemic. That, among other factors, has prompted the state of Maharashtra, which includes Bombay, to take an unusual step. It enacted a five-year ban, the longest permitted by law, on the production, sale, transport and possession of gutka, a $30 million business in the state, effective Aug. 1. Several other states have undertaken similar bans, although some have been stayed by the courts. It is easy, on the streets of Bombay, to find young men like Raga Vendra, now 19, a railway worker who began taking gutka at age 11. It is also easy to find gutka sellers, like Ahmed Maqsood, who say they have had customers as young as 6. Dr. Surendra Shastri, the head of preventive oncology at Tata Memorial Hospital, noticed about five years ago that his patients were getting younger, [...]

8/9/2002 New York AP "Basic Instinct" screenwriter Joe Eszterhas has throat cancer after a lifetime of smoking, and is urging Hollywood to stop glamorizing cigarette use the way he says he did. Eszterhas writes in an op-ed piece in Friday's New York Times that he was diagnosed with the disease 18 months ago. Much of his larynx is gone, he says, and he has difficulty speaking and being understood. "Smoking was an integral part of many of my screenplays because I was a militant smoker. It was part of a bad boy image I'd cultivated for a long time — smoking, drinking, partying, rock 'n' roll," the 57-year-old writes. "Smoking, I once believed, was every person's right. ... I don't think smoking is every person's right anymore. I think smoking should be as illegal as heroin." Eszterhas says he has trouble forgiving himself for the rampant cigarette use in his films. "I have been an accomplice to the murders of untold numbers of human beings. I am admitting this only because I have made a deal with God. Spare me, I said, and I will try to stop others from committing the same crimes I did." The writer of other guilty-pleasure movies, including "Flashdance," "Sliver" and "Showgirls," says there are "1,000 better and more original ways to reveal a character's personality" than with cigarettes. In 1992's "Basic Instinct," Eszterhas explains, smoking is part of the sexual subtext. " Sharon Stone's character smokes; Michael Douglas' is trying to quit. She seduces him [...]

8/8/2002 Melville, NY Business Wire Sullivan-Schein Dental, the U.S. Dental Business of Henry Schein, Inc. (Nasdaq:HSIC), announced today that OralCDx, a painless, early oral cancer detection test exclusively distributed by the company in the U.S., is credited with identifying more than 2,500 precancerous or cancerous lesions during the past 16 months, according to CDx Laboratories, developers of the OralCDx biopsy brush. Many of these cancers presented as benign-appearing spots or sores in the mouth have been traditionally overlooked or "watched" before this test became available. New evidence recently published in the Journal of the American Dental Association (Christian DC. J Am Dent Assoc 2002; 133: 357-62) confirms that, upon careful examination, dentists should expect to see at least two benign-appearing lesions that should be tested each week even in low-risk patients. Oral cancer results in more deaths nationwide than either melanoma (skin cancer) or cervical cancer, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Approximately one-half of all patients diagnosed with oral cancer survive more than five years following the diagnosis. However, when detected early, the disease is often curable. "I tested a white, very small lesion in one of my patients, a 20-year non-smoker, who came in for a cleaning," said Craig Steichen, DDS, of Albuquerque, N.M. "It turned out to be an early stage squamous cell carcinoma. This was one of those lesions that, without this test, would have gone undiagnosed until the cancer was more advanced. The OralCDx test I performed probably saved this patient's [...]

7/25/2002 Orlando Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center Toxicities were significantly higher among patients receiving chemoradiation than for those who received radiation alone. Adding chemotherapy to radiation for advanced head and neck cancer (HNC) treatment does not improve overall survival, according to preliminary results from a multicenter study presented at the 38th Annual Meeting of ASCO here. Although further patient follow-up is needed and additional studies are warranted, we continue to recommend that patients receive the current standard of care surgery followed by radiation alone,” said Arlene Forastiere, MD, professor of oncology and otolaryngology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore. Early studies suggested that combining certain chemotherapy drugs and radiation may have a synergistic effect in [patients with advanced HNC],” she said. Our current study shows that adding cisplatin to standard radiation treatment does not significantly reduce recurrence.” Forastiere and her colleagues evaluated 459 patients who had high-risk squamous cell carcinomas of the head and neck. After surgery to remove all detectable disease, all patients received 60 to 66 Gy in 30 to 33 fractions over 6.0 to 6.6 weeks. A group of 228 patients were randomly assigned to also receive 100 mg/m2 of IV cisplatin (Platinol, Bristol-Myers Squibb) on days 1, 22 and 43. With a median follow-up of 26.6 months, there was no significant difference in local cancer recurrence between the two groups. The local-regional control rate was 73.8% for patients who received only radiation and 79.2% for those who received chemoradiation. The two-year overall survival [...]

* 7/24/2002 New York Rueters Health A number of studies have suggested stress can hinder the body's immune system defenses. Now researchers say people may be able to fight back with the stress-relieving techniques of self-hypnosis. In a study of medical students under exam-time stress, investigators found that those who received "hypnotic-relaxation training" did not show the same reduction in key immune system components that their untrained counterparts did. Janice K. Kiecolt-Glaser and colleagues at Ohio State University in Columbus reported the findings recently in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. The researchers looked at 33 medical and dental students during relatively low-stress periods and around the time of the first major exam of the term. Half of the students attended sessions where they learned to relax through self-hypnosis. Kiecolt-Glaser's team took blood samples from all students at the start of the study and just before exams. They exposed the samples to foreign substances in order to observe the activity of T cells and other immune system defenses. The investigators found that during exam time, the self-hypnosis students launched stronger immune responses compared with students who did not learn the technique. And the more often students practiced the relaxation strategy, the stronger their immune response. In previous studies, Kiecolt-Glaser and her colleagues have found that stressful times may impair the body's wound-healing process and response to vaccination. They and other researchers have also found that relaxation techniques may combat these effects by relieving stress and boosting the immune system. [...]