chemotherapy

Head and neck cancer is more common than you think

Source: www.irishtimes.com Author: Jamie Ball Well over 1,000 people in Ireland are diagnosed each year with cancers of the head and neck, with almost three-quarters of cases being attributed to smoking and alcohol. Yet this pernicious form of cancer very often goes under-reported, or sufficient heed isn’t paid to the warning signs that, if caught early, may be the difference between life and death. This is why July 27th will mark the third World Head & Neck Cancer day, taking place across 53 countries. The 2017 National Cancer Strategy highlights the importance of prevention, detection and diagnosis, and education and awareness is key for early recognition of the disease. According to James Paul O’Neill, Prof of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery in Beaumont Hospital, Dublin and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, there can be many different types of cancers within the head and neck, each with their own tissue characteristics and biological behaviour. “Cancers may develop in several areas of this region, including the mouth, throat, larynx (voice box), glandular tissue (thyroid), salivary tissue (parotid gland), lymphatic tissue, nose, sinuses and skin. Patients have a large variety of symptoms and signs according to the subsite of the disease,” says O’Neill. He says surgery incorporates many different techniques and skills, as the region has essential functional roles, such as talking, breathing, smelling, hearing, chewing and swallowing. “We are now in the age of highly-specialised technological innovations. There is a drive towards minimally invasive surgery because we can perform the [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2017-07-25T08:28:00-07:00July, 2017|Oral Cancer News|

Beating HPV-positive throat cancer

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com Author: Pamela Tom, Contributor National Oral, Head, and Neck Cancer Awareness Week is April 12-18, 2017 For at least two years, 47 year-old Rob Clinton of Rochester, NY, would choke on post nasal drip in the shower. He knew something was wrong in his throat but he didn’t feel any pain. Did he have cancer? Clinton smoked cigarettes for 30 years and worked in an auto body shop where he was regularly exposed to carcinogens, but he wasn’t experiencing the typical symptoms of throat cancer. These include hoarseness or a change in the voice, difficulty swallowing, a persistent sore throat, ear pain, a lump in the neck, cough, breathing problems, and unexplained weight loss. In November 2015, Clinton went to the dentist to have his teeth cleaned. His dentist felt Clinton’s swollen neck and recommended that he visit a medical doctor. Clinton heeded the advice and sought the opinion of an ear, nose, and throat specialist at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY. The ENT doctor sent Clinton to have a CAT scan and when he scoped Clinton’s throat, the doctor said, “I see something in there.” What he saw was a tumor and there were a few other things going on too. The Diagnosis The biopsy showed that Clinton had Stage IVa oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) at the base of his tongue—and the cancer was HPV positive. HPV stands for the human papillomavirus and a recent survey found that more than 42% of Americans are infected [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2017-04-15T06:15:20-07:00April, 2017|Oral Cancer News|

UK cancer patient receives new jaw thanks to 3D printing

Source: http://www.3ders.org/ Author: staff 3D printing techniques are being adopted with increasing regularity in surgery of all kinds, and more and more patients are seeing a hugely improved quality of life thanks to the unique benefits of the technology. The most recent success story took place in the UK, where a patient’s jawbone was entirely reconstructed using bone from his leg. The pioneering surgical procedure made use of 3D printing at various different stages. Stephen Waterhouse was diagnosed with throat cancer eight years ago, and underwent chemotherapy and radiotherapy in order to fight it. The treatments were a great success and his cancer went away, but they had an unfortunate side effect. His jawbone had started to crumble, and emergency surgery was required before it completely disintegrated. The 53-year-old was taken to Royal Stoke University Hospital, which had purchased a new 3D printer just two years previously. Costing the hospital trust around £150,000 (about $188K), the machine is the only one of its kind in the country, and was a crucial part of the effort to save the patient’s jawbone. A 3D model was designed from a scan of his remaining intact jaw and printed out as a mold, which was then used to reconstruct the jaw using bone taken from his fibula. The operation lasted around 12 hours and was a great success. According to Daya Gahir, consultant in maxillofacial and head and neck surgery, the hospital does "at least 40 major head and neck reconstructions per year. Around [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2017-03-24T12:15:15-07:00March, 2017|Oral Cancer News|

Magnolia man joins exclusive trial in battle against cancer

Source: www.cantonrep.com Author: Denise Sautters Rich Bartlett is looking forward to getting back to his hobbies — woodworking and nature watching — and enjoying a good steak and potato dinner. Until then, though, he is in a fight for his life, one he plans to win. Bartlett is a cancer patient and the first participant in a clinical trial at University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center in Cleveland to test the safety of an immunotherapy drug — Pembrolizumab — when added to a regimen of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Back to the beginning Bartlett went to the dentist in October for a checkup. "He had a sore in his mouth he thought was an abscess," explained his wife, Nancy Bartlett, who pointed out that, because radiation and chemo treatments cause the inside of the mouth to burn and blister, it is hard for Bartlett to talk. "When the dentist looked at his sore, he sent Richard to a specialist in Canton, and in early November, he had a biopsy done. It came back positive for cancer." From there, he was referred to Dr. Pierre Lavertu, director of head and neck surgery and oncology at University Hospitals, and Dr. Chad Zender from the otolaryngology department, who did Bartlett's surgery. "They let us know it was serious," said Nancy. "It had gone into the bone and the roof of the mouth, but they were not sure if it had gone into the lymph nodes. By the time we got through that appointment, [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2017-03-20T08:31:02-07:00March, 2017|Oral Cancer News|

Artificial larynx implant helps throat cancer patient breathe and speak

Source: www.ctvnews.ca Author: staff Sixteen months after receiving an artificial larynx, a 56-year-old French man suffering from throat cancer can now whisper and breathe normally. A report published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine considers this to be a significant first achievement. Thanks to the implant, a 56-year-old throat cancer patient can now whisper and breathe normally. © ChrisChrisW / Istock.com This is the first time that doctors have observed a patient with the implant long term recover functions such as breathing and speaking after the complete removal of the larynx. Thanks to an artificial voice box, implanted in 2015 at France's Strasbourg-Hautepierre university hospital, the 56-year-old Frenchman, who lives in Alsace, can now whisper in a comprehensible manner and breathe normally. The patient has also recovered his sense of smell, which was damaged by the removal of the larynx. Other than the vocal cords, the larynx features an upper valve, called the epiglottis, which closes when food passes down the throat to prevent it from entering the windpipe. The prosthetic larynx was developed by a French company called Protip Médical. It consists of a rigid titanium and silicone structure replacing the larynx and a removable titanium part that mimics the function of the epiglottis. The only problem that remains unresolved in the implant is the function of the epiglottis. As a result, the patient coughs from time to time when eating, as food accidentally enters the windpipe. However, the surgeons still consider the functioning implant [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2017-01-11T09:41:28-07:00January, 2017|Oral Cancer News|

Hog jowls and clementines: A bid to awaken cancer patients’ ruined sense of taste

Source: www.statnews.com Author: Eric Boodman The medicines were rich and strange, their active ingredients so particular they sounded fictional. Credit: Molly Ferguson for Stat One regimen involved jowl bits from Red Wattle hogs; the pigs were bred from sows named Fart Blossom and Hildegard, and had spent the end of their lives gorging on acorns, hickory nuts, apples, and black walnuts. Another experimental drug included the flesh of the Ubatuba pepper, picked when it was red as a Santa suit, dried at precisely 90 degrees for five days, and then pulverized, seeds and all, into a fragrant, pinkish powder. These concoctions were meant to be therapeutic — but they hadn’t been devised by pharmacologists or biochemists or even lab techs. Their inventors had no scientific training whatsoever: They were celebrity Montreal chef Frédéric Morin and renowned Atlanta pastry-maker Taria Camerino, who would be facing off in an unusual culinary duel. They’d been challenged to help solve a problem that most clinicians and neuroscientists aren’t able to — the impairment of taste in cancer patients who undergo chemotherapy and radiation. This cook-off in the University of Kentucky’s demo kitchen was the opener for the second annual Neurogastronomy Symposium, which was born over a boozy, late-night chance encounter between neuropsychologist Dan Han and Morin in the chef’s restaurant. Together, they envisioned a conference that would combine neuroscience, agriculture, history, nutrition, medicine, and cooking — to understand the art and science of why we eat what we eat, and how we [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2016-12-21T09:06:48-07:00December, 2016|Oral Cancer News|

Immunotherapy drug a ‘gamechanger’ for head and neck cancer

Source: www.theguardian.com Author: staff An immunotherapy drug hailed as a potential gamechanger in the treatment of cancer could soon offer new hope to patients with currently untreatable forms of the disease. Nivolumab outperformed chemotherapy significantly in keeping relapsed head and neck cancer patients alive. Photograph: Alamy Nivolumab was found to extend the lives of relapsed patients diagnosed with head and neck cancers who had run out of therapy options. After a year of treatment, 36% of trial patients treated with the drug were still alive compared with 17% of those given standard chemotherapy. Trial participants treated with nivolumab typically survived for 7.5 months, and some for longer. Middle-range survival for patients on chemotherapy was 5.1 months. The phase-three study, the last stage in the testing process before a new treatment is licensed, provided the first evidence of a drug improving survival in this group of patients. Prof Kevin Harrington, from the Institute of Cancer Research, London, who led the British arm of the international trial, said: “Nivolumab could be a real gamechanger for patients with advanced head and neck cancer. This trial found that it can greatly extend life among a group of patients who have no existing treatment options, without worsening quality of life. “Once it has relapsed or spread, head and neck cancer is extremely difficult to treat. So it’s great news that these results indicate we now have a new treatment that can significantly extend life, and I’m keen to see it enter the clinic [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2016-10-09T14:08:46-07:00October, 2016|Oral Cancer News|

Men with throat cancer will soon outnumber women with cervical cancer In The US

Source: www.houstonpublicmedia.org Author: Carrie Feibel The national increase in cases of oropharyngeal cancer related to the human papilloma virus is troubling, because there is no screening test to catch it early, like the Pap test for cervical cancer. The oropharynx is the area of the throat behind the mouth, and includes the tonsils and the base of the tongue. Oropharyngeal cancer is increasing in both men and women, but for reasons that aren’t well understood, male patients are outnumbering female patients by five to one, according to Dr. Erich Sturgis, a head and neck surgeon at MD Anderson Cancer Center. “It’s usually a man, and he notices it when he’s shaving. He notices a lump there,” Sturgis said. “That lump is actually the spread of the cancer from the tonsil or the base of the tongue to a lymph node. That means it’s already stage three at least.” In the U.S., the number of oropharyngeal cancers caused by HPV are predicted to exceed the number of cervical cancers by 2020, Stugis said. “With cervical cancer, we’ve seen declining numbers well before we had vaccination, and that’s due to the Pap smear being introduced back in the late 50s,” he said. “But we don’t have a screening mechanism for pharynx cancer.” Research on an effective screening test for early-stage pharynx cancer is still underway. The reasons for the disproportionate effect on men are unknown. One theory is that people are engaging in more oral sex, but that doesn’t explain why men [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2016-09-28T07:20:10-07:00September, 2016|Oral Cancer News|

Incisionless robotic surgery offers promising outcomes for oropharyngeal cancer patients

Source: medicalxpress.com Author: press release, Henry Ford Health System A new study from researchers at Henry Ford Hospital finds an incisionless robotic surgery – done alone or in conjunction with chemotherapy or radiation – may offer oropharyngeal cancer patients good outcomes and survival, without significant pain and disfigurement. Patients with cancers of the base of tongue, tonsils, soft palate and pharynx who underwent TransOral Robotic Surgery, or TORS, as the first line of treatment experienced an average three-year survival from time of diagnosis. Most notably, the study's preliminary results reveal oropharyngeal cancer patients who are p16 negative – a marker for the human papilloma virus, or HPV, that affects how well cancer will respond to treatment – have good outcomes with TORS in combination with radiation and/or chemotherapy. "For non-surgical patients, several studies have shown that p16 positive throat cancers, or HPV- related throat cancers, have better survival and less recurrence than p16 negative throat cancers," says study lead author Tamer Ghanem, M.D., Ph.D., director of Head and Neck Oncology and Reconstructive Surgery Division in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery at Henry Ford Hospital. "Within our study, patients treated with robotic surgery had excellent results and survival, irrespective of their p16 status." Study results will be presented Sunday, Sept. 18 at the 2016 American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery (AAO-HNS) annual meeting in San Diego. Led by Dr. Ghanem, Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit was among the first in the country to perform TORS using the da [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2016-09-18T06:20:43-07:00September, 2016|Oral Cancer News|

Expert says Nivolumab Poised to Change Standard of Care in SCCHN

Source: www.onclive.com Author: Laura Panjwani Nivolumab (Opdivo) is a game-changing agent for the treatment of patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (SCCHN), according to Robert L. Ferris, MD, PhD. “Recent findings have shown us that this agent is really the new standard-of-care option for all platinum-refractory patients with head and neck cancer,” says Ferris, vice chair for Clinical Operations, associate director for Translational Research, and co-leader of the Cancer Immunology Program at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. “This is regardless of whether patients are PD-L1–positive or negative or whether they are HPV-positive or negative.” The PD-L1 inhibitor received a priority review designation by the FDA in July 2016 based on the CheckMate-141 study, which demonstrated a median overall survival (OS) with nivolumab of 7.5 months compared with 5.1 months with investigator's choice of therapy (HR, 0.70; 95% CI, 0.51-0.96; P = .0101) in patients with recurrent or metastatic SCCHN. The objective response rate (ORR) was 13.3% with nivolumab and 5.8% for investigator's choice. The FDA is scheduled to make a decision on the application for the PD-1 inhibitor by November 11, 2016, as part of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act. Ferris was the lead author on an analysis that further evaluated preliminary data from CheckMate-141, which was presented at the 2016 ASCO Annual Meeting. In an interview with OncLive, he discusses the findings of this study, potential biomarkers for nivolumab, and questions that remain regarding the use of the immunotherapy in SCCHN. OncLive: What [...]

Charlotte Parker2016-08-24T13:28:58-07:00August, 2016|Oral Cancer News|