head and neck cancer – Page 18

Hospital Performs Area’s First Robotic Surgeries on Oral Cancers HEALTH CARE: Technique Could Reduce the Length Of Patients Hospital Stay

Source: San Diego Business Journal By: Steve Sinovic The first transoral robotic surgeries in San Diego have been performed at Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center and all three patients who underwent those procedures are recovering well, said the surgeon who is leading up the effort to help patients beat early-stage oral cancer. Advances in robotic surgery prompted the hospital to look for ways to apply that technology to treat tumors of the mouth and throat. And thanks to a local benefactor, the institution hopes to be performing more procedures on local patients. The hospital is one of fewer than a dozen in the U.S. to offer the procedure, which was launched thanks to a $1.2 million anonymous donation to Sharp Chula Vista. The donation helped fund the acquisition of Intuitive Surgical Inc.’s da Vinci Surgical System, said Dan Dredla, vice president of business development for the 343-bed hospital in south San Diego County. “We were fortunate that a donor helped us purchase the da Vinci,” said Dredla. “It’s a costly system, and it was challenging to find the capital to acquire it on our own.” The da Vinci robot, which combines enhanced 3-D views with precise incision capabilities, is already being used for various surgeries at hundreds of hospitals throughout the country and around the world. However, it was just recently that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved using the da Vinci for the transoral surgeries, or TORS, procedures on head and neck cancers. While Dredla didn’t have exact [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-12-17T11:39:08-07:00December, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Zometa aids patients with head and neck cancer

Source: DrBicuspid.com Zoledronic acid, a drug currently approved for osteoporosis treatment, has been shown to reduce bone loss in a study of mice with oral cancer, suggesting it could serve as a supplemental therapy in patients with head and neck cancers that erode bone (Cancer Research, November 1, 2010, Vol. 70:21, pp. 8607-8616). The drug, known by the brand name Zometa, is designed to inhibit bone resorption. Oral squamous cell carcinoma accounts for about 90% of all tumors in the mouth, according to the National Cancer Institute. The five-year survival rate for this form of cancer is 61% for all stages combined. When these tumors form in the gums, their growth in the mouth leads to bone loss in the jaw. In turn, bone erosion stimulates the cancer to grow. Scientists call this phenomenon, driven in part by the release of cancer stimulatory compounds from bone, a vicious cycle that occurs in this and other forms of cancer. Even though the bone loss itself is not life-threatening, loss of bone means the tumor is continuing to grow. "The goal is to stop the vicious cycle," said Thomas Rosol, DVM, PhD, professor of veterinary biosciences at Ohio State, in a press release. "Chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery are all used to treat head and neck cancers. Zoledronic acid is a very safe drug and all it does is block bone resorption, so patients could receive all of the standard treatments, and this drug could be added as an additional benefit. That's the [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-12-15T11:16:48-07:00December, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Pertussis reaches epidemic proportions in California; New links identified between vaccine-preventable infections and cancer.

Source: Disabled World New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that adults remain largely unvaccinated against preventable infectious illnesses. At a news conference convened today by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID), experts in public health, infectious disease, oncology and other medical specialties discussed the data and the health consequences for adults who skip vaccines. They collectively called on all adults and health care providers to improve vaccination rates. "For more than six decades, vaccines have protected us from infectious illnesses that have a wide range of consequences, from lost work days and inability to meet our daily obligations, to pain, discomfort, hospitalization, long-term disability and death," said Susan J. Rehm, M.D., NFID medical director. According to Dr. Rehm, by foregoing needed vaccines, adults not only leave themselves vulnerable to sickness, but they expose those around them to unnecessary risks, too. This problem is evident right now, as pertussis (whooping cough) continues to claim the lives of infants in California, while adults, who are frequently responsible for transmitting the disease to infants, fail to get the one-time pertussis booster vaccine. The impact of other vaccine-preventable infections may not be as immediately apparent, but they are no less important. Other vaccines for adults protect against viruses that cause several types of cancer, reactivation of the chickenpox virus that causes shingles later in life, and infection with bacteria that are the leading cause of community-acquired pneumonia. New survey results from NFID suggest that doctor/patient communication challenges may [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-11-23T10:17:29-07:00November, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Superselective intra-arterial chemoradiotherapy with docetaxel-nedaplatin for advanced oral cancer.

Source: PubMed.gov Cisplatin-based, superselective, intra-arterial chemotherapy concurrent with radiotherapy (SSIACRT) has gained wide acceptance as a common/curative treatment for advanced head and neck cancer. We combined nedaplatin (CDGP) with docetaxel (DOC) as a new combination in SSIACRT for advanced oral squamous cell carcinoma in 2003. Twenty-two patients with advanced oral cancer were treated by radiotherapy (66Gy) concurrent with superselective intra-arterial DOC (40mg/body) and CDGP (80mg/m(2)) infusion between 2003 and 2009. Complete response was achieved in 18 (81.8%) of the 22 patients. Of the 17 patients with positive neck disease, 16 (94%) were assessed as disease-free. The 5-year overall survival rate was 78.5%, and the major adverse effects were leukocytopenia and mucositis. Five patients (22.7%) developed distant metastases post-treatment. These results indicate that intra-arterial docetaxel-nedaplatin infusion concurrent with radiotherapy is efficacious for advanced oral cancer. The side effects are easily manageable, and the most important outcome of the treatment is the preservation of patients' quality of life (QOL) and improved prognosis.

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-11-08T13:13:31-07:00November, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Survival of dental implants in irradiated head and neck cancer patients: a retrospective analysis

Source: HighWire, Stanford University By: A Buddula, DA Assad, TJ Salinas, YI Garces, JE Vloz and AL Weaver Purpose: To study the long-term survival of dental implants placed in irradiated bone in subjects who received radiation for head and neck cancer. Materials and Method: A retrospective chart review was conducted for all patients who received dental implants following radiation treatment for head and neck cancer between May 1, 1987 through July 1, 2008. Only patients irradiated with a radiation dose of 50?Gy or greater and those who received dental implants in the irradiated field after head and neck radiation were included in the study. The associations between implant survival and patient/implant characteristics were estimated by fitting univariate marginal Cox proportional hazards models. Results: A total of 48 patients who had prior head and neck radiation had 271 dental implants placed during May 1987 to July 2008. The estimated survival at 1, 5, and 10 years was 98.9%, 89.9%, and 72.3%, respectively. Implants placed in the maxilla were more likely to fail than implants placed in the mandible.There was also a tendency for implants placed in the posterior region to fail compared with those placed in the anterior region. Conclusion: Dental implants placed in irradiated bone have a greater risk for failure. Survival is significantly influenced by the location of the implant (maxilla or mandible, anterior or posterior).

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-11-07T08:23:58-07:00November, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Panitumumab Plus Platinum Chemo Misses Mark in Advanced Head and Neck Cancer

Source: Internal Medicine News Digital Network By: Patrice Wendling MILAN – Panitumumab plus chemotherapy with cisplatin and 5-fluorouracil proved clinically active, but failed to boost overall survival significantly in first-line recurrent or metastatic head and neck cancer in the global, phase III SPECTRUM trial. The primary end point of median overall survival showed a statistically insignificant increase from 9.0 months with chemotherapy alone to 11.1 months with the addition of panitumumab (Vectibix) (hazard ratio, 0.87; log-rank P = .14). Subgroup analysis revealed, however, that the effect of panitumumab, an anti–epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) monoclonal antibody, was not the same for all patients in the international study, lead author Dr. Jan Vermorken said at the annual congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology. Regional differences were observed, suggesting a greater benefit in patients from North/South America (HR, 0.69) and Western Europe (HR, 0.73) than in those in Eastern Europe (HR, 1.11). Asian Pacific patients fell somewhere in the middle (HR, 0.99). About 45% of patients in each arm used some form of subsequent antitumor activity once off the study protocol, but differences cropped up here as well. The use of cytotoxic chemotherapy was imbalanced at 30% in the panitumumab arm vs. 25% in the chemotherapy arm, while twice as many patients in the chemotherapy arm (12% vs. 6%) received subsequent targeted systemic therapy driven largely by the use of anti-EGFR monoclonal antibodies, observed Dr. Vermorken of the Antwerp University Hospital in Edegem, Belgium. “It’s clear this is the first [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-10-27T10:27:38-07:00October, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

The Major Component In Tumeric Enhances The Effect Of Chemotherapy In Suppressing Head And Neck Cancers

Curcumin, the major component in the spice turmeric, when combined with the drug Cisplatin enhances the chemotherapy's suppression of head and neck cancer cell growth, researchers with UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center have found. A naturally occurring spice widely used in South Asian and Middle Eastern cooking, Turmeric has long been known to have medicinal properties, attributed to its anti-inflammatory effects. Previous studies have shown it can suppress the growth of certain cancers, said Dr. Marilene Wang, a professor of head and neck surgery, lead author of the study and a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher. "Head and neck cancers, particularly cases diagnosed in a later stage, are terrible cancers that often require very radical surgeries and chemotherapy and radiation," Wang said. "They often don't present until late, and the structures in the head and neck are so vital that our treatments often cause disfigurement and severe loss of function. So using non-toxic curcumin as a treatment was a very appealing idea." The study, done in cells in Petri dishes and then in mouse models, appears in the October issue of the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics. In India, women for years have been using turmeric for medicinal purposes, as an anti-aging agent rubbed into their skin, to treat cramps during menstruation, as a poultice on the skin to promote wound healing and as an additive in cosmetics, said scientist Eri Srivatsan, an adjunct professor of surgery and a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher who, along with Wang, has been studying curcumin and its [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2010-10-21T15:06:19-07:00October, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

New cancer radiation technology improves accuracy, drops treatment time in select patients

Source: Medical News Today Author: Staff The Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Comprehensive Cancer Center is among the world's first to begin using radiation technology that dramatically reduces treatment times. UAB's Hazelrig-Salter Radiation Oncology Center is the third U.S. site to acquire TrueBeam technology. TrueBeam, by Varian Medical Systems Inc., can complete a standard 40-minute radiation therapy in less than a minute for select patients. The precision of the instrument, measured in increments of less than a millimeter, comes from real-time patient imaging, positioning, beam shaping and many other data points synchronized continually as treatment progresses. "This technology gives us the tools we need to shrink the number of treatment visits for some patients from weeks to days," says James A. Bonner, M.D., chair of UAB's Department of Radiation Oncology and a senior advisor at the Cancer Center. "Patients coming to UAB can expect leading-edge care with more options for fightingcancer and, hopefully, improved chances for survival." TrueBeam made its debut in the United States earlier in 2010 at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., and at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. TrueBeam can be used to treat tumors anywhere in the body where radiation treatment is indicated. The technology opens the door to new treatment plans and improved quality of life in patients who have challenging cancers such as in the lung, breast, abdomen and head and neck, as well as cancers that are treated with radiotherapy. However, the technology is still [...]

Charlotte Parker2010-08-22T12:38:34-07:00August, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Herpes virus used to treat cancer

Source: BBC News Author: Emma Wilkinson Doctors say they have used a genetically engineered herpes virus to treat successfully patients with head and neck cancer. A London hospital trial of 17 patients found that use of the virus alongside chemotherapy and radiotherapy helped kill the tumours in most patients. It works by getting into cancer cells, killing them from the inside, and also boosting the patient's immune system. Further trials are planned for later in the year. Head and neck cancer, which includes cancer of the mouth, tongue and throat, affects up to 8,000 people every year in the UK. Study leader Dr Kevin Harrington, who is based at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, said current treatments were effective if the cancer was picked up early but that many patients were not diagnosed until it was more advanced. The herpes virus, which is also being tested in patients with skin cancer, is genetically manipulated so that it grows inside tumour cells but cannot infect normal healthy cells. Once there it has a triple effect - it multiplies, killing tumour cells as it does so, it is engineered to produce a human protein that activates the immune system and it also makes a viral protein that acts as a red flag to immune cells. 'Potential weapon' In the 17 patients injected with the virus, in addition to their standard treatment, at the Royal Marsden Hospital, 93% showed no trace of cancer after their tumour had been surgically removed. More [...]

Charlotte Parker2010-08-03T15:24:00-07:00August, 2010|Oral Cancer News|

Head and neck cancer among lifelong never-smokers and ever-smokers: matched-pair analysis of outcomes after radiation therapy

Source: HighWire Medline Author: Am J Clin Oncol From the Departments of *Radiation Oncology and daggerOtolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, University of California Davis School of Medicine, Sacramento, CA. PURPOSE:: An increasing proportion of patients with head and neck cancer have no history of smoking. The purpose of this analysis was to compare the clinical outcomes between patients without a history of smoking (never-smokers) and those with a previous history of smoking (ever-smokers) treated by radiation therapy. METHODS AND MATERIALS:: Seventy patients with newly diagnosed squamous cell carcinoma of the oropharynx or oral cavity without a previous history of smoking were matched to a control ever-smoker with a positive tobacco history (>10 pack-years) based on age, gender, ethnicity, Karnofsky Performance Status, primary tumor site, disease stage, primary treatment, radiation dose, and start date. Outcome was compared using Kaplan-Meier analysis. Normal tissue effects were graded according to the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group/European Organization for the Treatment of Cancer radiation toxicity criteria. RESULTS:: With a median follow-up of 33 months, lifelong never-smokers had an increased 3-year overall survival (86% vs. 69%), disease-free survival (82% vs. 65%), and local-regional control (85% vs. 70%) compared with the ever-smoker control population (P < 0.05, for all). These differences remained statistically significant when patients treated by postoperative or definitive radiation therapy were analyzed separately. The incidence of grade 3+ complications was also significantly lower among never-smokers compared with ever-smokers (10% vs. 29%, P = 0.01). CONCLUSIONS:: Prognosis differed significantly between never-smokers and ever-smokers with head and neck [...]

Charlotte Parker2010-07-20T14:11:01-07:00July, 2010|Oral Cancer News|