cancer – Senator Medical AB

Four Things Patients with Cancer Should Know About Coronavirus 2020

admin — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 13:56:48 +0000

Here are the four key things that patients with cancer need to know as they prepare for the corona-virus:

Take Preventive Measures Like You Normally Would
Make Sure You Get the Flu Shot
Only Testing Can Determine If You Have Corona-virus
Cancer Drugs Manufactured Overseas Are Okey

Reference Article

Who can take benefit of Electrochemotherapy? Simply explained!

admin — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 13:39:48 +0000

What is electrochemotherapy?

Electrochemotherapy is a way of getting specific chemotherapy drug into cancer cells.

It is a combination of:

Chemotherapy injected into the tumour or bloodstream
Aan electric pulse to send the chemotherapy into the cancer cells (called electroporation)

A special probe sends an electric pulse to the tumour. The electric pulse changes the outer layer of the cancer cell. This makes it easier for the chemotherapy to get inside the cell.

Who can have electrochemotherapy?

Doctors use electrochemotherapy for cancers that started in the skin or have spread to the skin from elsewhere. These include:

Basal and squamous cell skin cancers
Melanoma skin cancer
Kaposi’s sarcoma
Breast cancer that has spread to the skin
Head and neck cancers that have spread to the skin

Electrochemotherapy has been approved by many of European Health Authorities including the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) as a possible treatment to relieve symptoms for people with cancers affecting their skin. It can help to control symptoms when other treatments are no longer working.

Most people who have this treatment have shown improvement in their symptoms. How much it helps varies from one person to another. You might need more than one treatment to control your symptoms.

Research is looking into finding out more about how well it works and which patients it can help.

Having electrochemotherapy

You usually have electrochemotherapy as a day patient. But occasionally people need to stay in hospital overnight. You will have either a general anaesthetic, so you are asleep, or you might have a local anaesthetic with a drug to make you sleepy (sedation).

You have chemotherapy as either:

An injection into the tumour (intratumoural)
An injection into your bloodstream through a small tube (intravenously)

The type of chemotherapy you might have is either Cisplatin or Bleomycin. You have much lower dose than with standard chemotherapy treatment. This is because the electric pulse helps the chemotherapy get through the cell wall. Lower doses of chemotherapy mean fewer side effects.

Injection into the tumour

You might have this treatment awake with a local anasethetic to numb the area or you might be asleep (general anasethetic).

First you have an injection of local anaesthetic to numb the area. The doctor then injects the chemotherapy and you have the electric pulse immediately afterwards.

Injection into a vein

You usually need to have this while you are asleep, under general anaesthetic.

You have the chemotherapy into a vein. Then eight minutes later, you have the electric pulse to the tumour.

The electric pulse comes from a special machine. Attached to the machine is a probe. The probe is the size of a large pen and has an electrode on it. The doctor puts the electrode against your skin to deliver an electric pulse to the tumour.

Your whole treatment can take between 10 and 60 minutes, depending on how many tumours you have.

Side effects of electrochemotherapy

The main side effect is pain in the area where the electrode touches the skin. This is usually mild and lasts for a couple of days. More rarely some people have more severe pain that can last between two and four weeks. Your doctor or clinical nurse specialist will give you some painkillers if you need them.

Some people have muscle contractions during the treatment. Your doctor can slightly alter the way they give treatment if this is uncomfortable. You may also feel sick but this is usually mild and you can have anti sickness medicines. Infection in the area you have treatment is rare. Tell your doctor if you notice the area has become redder, swollen, painful or if there is any discharge.

You might notice the colour of your skin changes where you had treatment. It might be darker or lighter. This usually fades with time but can be permanent for some people.

The area where you have treatment can form an ulcer or the skin might breakdown. If this happens you will need a nurse to dress it until it heals. This might take a couple of weeks.

Research into electrochemotherapy

So far, researchers have used electrochemotherapy to control symptoms of advanced skin cancers when other treatments aren’t working.

In the future, researchers hope that electrochemotherapy could become a treatment for early skin cancers. But we need to compare it with the current standard treatments and this can take many years.

Researchers are also looking into using electric pulses to treat cancers in body cavities. These include early bladder cancers and cancers in the chest. This treatment in body cavities is called electromotive drug administration.

Reference: Cancer Research, UK, 2019

Increase of survival & immunoresponse enhancement with ElectroChemotherapy in Lung & Colorectal cancer in mural models-2019

admin — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 09:43:07 +0000

Electrochemotherapy

Is an emerging treatment modality for cancer patients which can effectively reduce tumour burden and induce immunogenic cell death. Electrochemotherapy is most commonly used with bleomycin as the drug of choice, here we examine the efficacy of electrochemotherapy with cisplatin. Electrochemotherapy with cisplatin was found to effectively reduce tumour growth in a range of murine models and induce significant intratumoural recruitment of myeloid and humoral immune cells. Following the observations of immune system mobilisation, we have shown an ability of electrochemotherapy to reduce metastatic potential as determined by tumour burden in the lung, and to exert an abscopal effect by reducing growth at distal untreated secondary tumours.

What drugs are being used most in ElectroChemotherapy? Bleomycin & Cisplatin

Highlights

• ECT with cisplatin is an effective form of therapy showing significant decrease in cancer cell growth in vitro and in vivo.•

• Immune cell mobilisation is visible locally and systemically following treatment.•

• ECT with cisplatin may be useful in reducing the growth of distal untreated growth and controlling metastatic disease.

Read the entire article on this LINK

Reference:

Cancer Letters

Volume 442, 1 February 2019, Pages 475-482

Promising results of Electrochemotherapy as a potential treatment for pancreatic cancer

admin — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 09:44:14 +0000

Treatment of pancreatic cancer might be enhanced by zapping tumours with electricity alongside drug treatments (Bleomycin or Cisplatin)

Electrochemotherapy delivers short, intense pulses of electricity to a tumour, which temporarily increase how porous cancer cells are, allowing more drugs to flood inside.

The technique is currently used to treat skin cancers and some breast cancers, which can easily be reached by the electrodes needed to deliver the pulses of electricity.

Researchers at CancerResearch@UCC have found that a technique known as electrochemotherapy causes pancreatic cancer cells to become more sensitive to three widely used anti-cancer drugs.

With PCRF funding, Dr Patrick Forde – who led the research – is investigating whether it can be used for tumours in the pancreas, deep inside the body.

The results also revealed that the cells died in a specific way that may have implications for how the immune system responds to the cancer cells after the drug treatment.

Keywords: #electrochemotherapy #pancreatic cancer

Reference: Read full article

Economy of Cancer-CANCER IS EXPENSIVE!!

admin — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 15:39:05 +0000

Not a week goes by that I don’t see a blog or Facebook post asking how to help a friend with cancer. People often suggest many tangible things, but rarely money. Given our focus on the financial side of cancer this month, I’d like to clear up some things and provide a suggestion.

There aren’t many one size fits all ways to help someone going through treatment. Cooking meals is nice for some, but others may not be up to or able to eat (mouth sores can really make it hard to get down a meatloaf). Some people would love a snugly pair of pajamas, while for others this is just a reminder of their illness. In the end, asking the person what they need is usually best.

There is one thing that almost all people going through cancer treatment will experience: cancer is EXPENSIVE. You may think having health insurance means patients and families do not need to worry about the cost of care. But even those with “good insurance” will undoubtedly feel the financial hold of cancer treatment. There are so many expenses not covered by insurance, that any financial help would be appreciated by most patients and caregivers. Here are just a few examples of the unexpected costs of cancer:

Surprise! Medicare doesn’t pay the whole bill! It is an 80/20 split – with the patient paying 20% of the bill. At several thousand dollars a chemotherapy treatment, that adds up quickly.
Co-pays, co-pays, co-pays. You know that $25 you pay when you see your PCP for a cold? Multiply that by a lot – every doctor visit, every radiology test, every blood draw and chemo infusion. And don’t even get me started on deductibles!
The cost of gas and parking add up quickly too. If the patient ends up in the hospital for a period, add on daily parking costs for the caregiver and money to eat while there.
Job related costs – maybe the person cannot work and has to take time off without pay. This may be true for the caregiver as well. Perhaps they have to pay for COBRA to maintain their health insurance on top of that.
Dependent care costs – this could be added childcare expenses or for the care of an elderly parent. Maybe the patient is usually the babysitter but can no longer reliably provide this care.

Reference: Oncolink

Which Cancer Therapies Fall Under Immunotherapy Protocols?

admin — Thu, 17 Oct 2019 11:49:05 +0000

Adoptive Cell Transfer Therapy (ACT)

ACT is a type of immunotherapy which helps the body fight disease through the presence of T-Cells. T-cells are lymphocytes which play an integral role in the immune response. T-cells are found in the patient’s blood and tissue, grown in a laboratory environment, and then re-infused into the patient. ACT is also referred to as: adoptive cell transfer, cellular adoptive immunotherapy, and T-cell transfer therapy.

Checkpoint Inhibitors

Checkpoint inhibitors are drugs that block certain proteins that restrain T-cells from attacking cancer cells. When these proteins are blocked, the T-cells are unleashed to attack cancer cells more effectively.

Monoclonal Antibodies (MABs)

Monoclonal antibodies (MABs) are produced in a laboratory and they can enhance the body’s natural mechanisms to attack cancer cells. There are different types of MABs and they function in various ways to treat cancer including: blocking cell growth, triggering an immune system response, directly attacking cancer cells, etc.

Treatment Vaccines

Cancer treatment vaccines stimulate the immune system to identify and destroy cancer cells that have cancer-specific antigens on their surface. The vaccines can help destroy cancer cells, prevent the return of cancer, and/or halt the growth of a cancerous tumor.

Cytokines

Cytokines are proteins made by the body’s immune cells. Cytokine therapy may help the immune system attack cancerous cells. The two main types of cytokines used to treat cancer are interleukins and interferons.

Reference: Oncology Specialists of Charlotte

PTSD syndrome may increase risk for ovarian cancer-New study suggests

admin — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 13:45:59 +0000

The findings were published Sept. 5 2019 in the journal Cancer Research

“Ovarian cancer has been called a ‘silent killer’ because it is difficult to detect in its early stages; therefore identifying more specifically who may be at increased risk for developing the disease is important for prevention or earlier treatment,” study co-author Laura Kubzansky, a professor of social and behavioral sciences, said in a Harvard news release.

Ovarian cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer death in U.S. women.

“Ovarian cancer has relatively few known risk factors — PTSD and other forms of distress, like depression, may represent a novel direction in ovarian cancer prevention research,” said study co-author Shelley Tworoger, associate center director of population science at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla.

Researchers analyzed data from a national study of nearly 55,000 U.S. women and concluded that those who’d had six to seven symptoms of PTSD — such as being easily startled by common noises or avoiding reminders of the traumatic experience — at some point in their life had twice the risk of ovarian cancer compared to those who never had any PTSD symptoms.

“In light of these findings, we need to understand whether successful treatment of PTSD would reduce this risk, and whether other types of stress are also risk factors for ovarian cancer,” said co-author Andrea Roberts, a research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.

The study also found that these women were at significantly higher risk of the most common and aggressive form of the disease.

Women who’d had four to five PTSD symptoms at some point in their life also had an increased risk of ovarian cancer, but the risk did not reach statistical significance, according to the study.

Studies in animals have shown that stress and stress hormones can accelerate ovarian tumor growth, and that chronic stress is associated with larger and more invasive tumors. A human study found an association between PTSD and ovarian cancer, but it included only seven women with ovarian cancer and PTSD. Like this study, the current research only found an association rather than a cause-and-effect link.

More information

The American Cancer Society has more on ovarian cancer.

Top 10 jobs with higher risk of cancer

admin — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 13:44:45 +0000

Exposure to carcinogenic toxins such as formaldehyde, arsenic, and carbon monoxide is common in some occupations.

Here are 10 commonly held jobs that can be associated with a higher risk of cancer.

Pilots

Lifeguards

Any Desk-job

Nail-salon workers

Farmers and others in agricultural jobs

Firefighters

Painters

Rubber manufacturers

Construction Workers

Morticians and undertakers

Read the entire article HERE

Good news! Death rates for breast cancer have been falling on average 1.8% each year over 2007-2016.

admin — Mon, 19 Aug 2019 06:53:20 +0000

Latest cancer statistics show a great progress in 2019

Number of New Cases and Deaths per 100,000: The number of new cases of female breast cancer was 127.5 per 100,000 women per year. The number of deaths was 20.6 per 100,000 women per year. These rates are age-adjusted and based on 2012-2016 cases and deaths.

Lifetime Risk of Developing Cancer: Approximately 12.8 percent of women will be diagnosed with female breast cancer at some point during their lifetime, based on 2014-2016 data.

Prevalence of This Cancer: In 2016, there were an estimated 3,477,866 women living with female breast cancer in the United States.

Read the entire article from National Cancer Institute WEBSITE

Are you more exposed to cancer just because of your job?

admin — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 07:17:10 +0000

Professions associated with Cancer risk

About 5-8% of all cancers worldwide are caused by exposures to carcinogens in the workplace, according to the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. Although the rate of workplace-related cancers has decreased due to safety regulations, exposure to some dusts, gases, and chemicals can increase cancer risk in those who are frequently exposed. What’s more, there are hidden health risks for the average worker in seemingly safer industries or environments that could increase the risk of getting cancer.

Professions at a higher risk of exposure and cancer risk include:

Office jobs

Sitting for most of the day — whether at a desk, in front of a screen, or behind the wheel — can increase one’s cancer risk. Studies have found that those who sat for more than 8 hours a day with no physical activity had a risk of dying similar to the risk posed by obesity and smoking. Overtime, sitting regularly for long periods of time can cause other adverse effects, such as:

Increased blood pressure
High blood sugar (hyperglycemia)
High cholesterol levels
Excess body fat around the waist

Shift work

Chronic disruptions to natural circadian rhythms have been linked to an increase in a variety of disorders, including cancer. When you work a night shift — such as taxi or rideshare drivers, merchandise stocker, or police officers — your body’s natural circadian rhythm is disrupted. This can not only cause changes in sleeping patterns, but in other activities such as body temperature and digestion. Studies have shown that cancer development is closely related to a loss of circadian balance in how we burn energy, respond to infection and disease, and age.

Truck drivers are especially at risk because in addition to the overnight work, the job entails sitting a lot of the time, regardless of the time of day.

Agriculture and forestry careers

Sun exposure can cause burns from UV rays, increasing the risk of skin cancer or melanoma. This is especially true in areas or climates where there is increased sun exposure, and in those with fair skin or a family history of skin cancer. Exposure to some agricultural chemicals — such as pesticides and fertilizers, or engine exhaust — can also increase the risk of cancers like lymphoma and leukemia.

Rubber manufacturing jobs

Working in factories that produce tires, rubber gloves, rubber bands, and other rubber products increases exposure to carcinogenic chemicals. Chemicals and toxins from rubber manufacturing are more often absorbed through the skin from repetitive skin constant, not just through inhalation. The International Agency for Research on Cancer(IARC) conducted a study determining that there are specific chemicals related to a heightened risk of bladder, leukemia, lung, and stomach cancer in the rubber industry.

Construction and mining work

The biggest carcinogenic risk for construction workers is exposure to asbestos. An estimated 1.3 million construction and general industry workers are potentially exposed to asbestos each year. Cancers associated with asbestos exposure include larynx, lung, ovary, and mesothelioma.

Miners are also at risk of exposure to asbestos, but underground workers are also more likely to encounter uranium and radon, which can lead to a higher risk of cancer. Working in mines can put you at risk for a variety of cancers, including brain, mesothelioma, stomach, and thyroid cancers.

Reducing career-related cancer risk

Across these professions, there are some preventative measures you can take to lower your cancer risk.

If working in construction, agriculture, or a job that requires you to be outside for most of the day, use sunscreen and limit exposure as much as possible by finding shade when possible. Sunglasses are also important to protect your eyes from harmful UV rays.

Fields such as construction and rubber manufacturing have laws that protect workers from and limit chemical and asbestos exposure. These regulations protect workers, requiring they wear protective equipment (such as face masks) and setting legal asbestos exposure limits. Quitting or never smoking cigarettes can help decrease the risk of asbestos-related lung cancer.

If you find yourself sitting most of the day, stand or take a brief walk every 30 minutes. If possible, try a standing desk or position your work surface above a treadmill. Studiesshow that an hour of moderate exercise a day counters the effects of too much sitting.

Reference article