research – Senator Medical AB

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

WHO warning: E-cigarettes won’t help in reducing cancer

admin — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 09:38:53 +0000

No evidence to justify their claim according to World Health Organization (WHO)

Electronic cigarettes and heated tobacco products are not helping fight cancer, the World Health Organisation (WHO) says, urging smokers and governments not to trust claims from cigarette firms about their latest products.

The seventh “WHO report on the global tobacco epidemic” said blocking the industry’s interference was critical to cutting the harm from tobacco use.

“The tobacco industry has a long history of systemic, aggressive, sustained and well-resourced opposition to tobacco control measures,” the report said.

“While some strategies are public and others more covert, all have the goal of weakening tobacco control.”

The report said tobacco giant Philip Morris International was trying to position itself as a responsible public health partner via its “Unsmoke” campaign, which encourages people to “change to a better alternative”.

The WHO said the campaign aimed to ensure tobacco remained socially acceptable, while confusing consumers with terms such as “smoke-free products”, which may refer to products with toxic emissions and unknown short-term and long-term health effects.

Philip Morris spokesman Ryan Sparrow said the WHO’s message made it harder to provide safer options for people who cannot quit smoking.

“There is no question that the best choice for smokers is to quit cigarettes and nicotine altogether. The reality is many people do not. We cannot turn our backs on them,” he said. “Organisations like the World Health Organisation need to stop talking at smokers and start listening.”

The WHO report said the industry hoped to win respectability through manipulative messages such as claiming their products were part of a “harm reduction” strategy, even though cigarettes still account for 97 per cent of the global tobacco market.

Vinayak Prasad, program manager of WHO’s tobacco control unit, said development of new products was solely intended to expand the markets of tobacco firms.

“There is no difference between cigarettes and heated tobacco products except that in terms of exposure: the exposure is less and the smoke is not visible,” he said.

Electronic cigarettes, containing nicotine but not tobacco, were promoted as a way to quit smoking. But there was no evidence to justify the claim, and evidence from the United States showed they had increased the prevalence of young people smoking, he said.

“So it’s also a gateway for young people,” Prasad said.

“The answer is it needs to be regulated. WHO has clear guidelines – to get electronic cigarettes regulated. And if you are banning it, fine, but if you aren’t banning it don’t let it (go) free in the market, because the young people are taking it up.”

Reference: WHO, 7news

Morning people are less likely to develop breast cancer, UK 2018 study suggests

admin — Sat, 15 Dec 2018 16:04:24 +0000

Women who are early risers are less likely to develop breast cancer, according to UK researchers at the University of Bristol.

Women who wake up early have a lower risk of developing breast cancer, according to researchers in the United Kingdom.

A team at the University of Bristol in England analyzed data from 180,215 women enrolled with the UK Biobank project, and 228,951 women who had been part of a genome-wide association study of breast cancer led by the international Breast Cancer Association Consortium. The findings, which were not peer-reviewed, were presented at the NCRI Cancer Conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

Using a genetic method known as Mendelian randomization, researchers found that women who prefer mornings have a 40 to 48 percent reduced risk of developing breast cancer. Also, the research notes that women who slept longer than seven to eight hours had a 20 percent increased risk per additional hour slept.

Rebecca Richmond, a research fellow at the University of Bristol involved in the study, said the findings could have implications for those working night shifts. Still more studies must be done to understand the connection between waking up earlier or later in the day and breast cancer diagnosis.

“It may not be the case that changing your habits changes your risk of breast cancer; it may be more complex than that,” Richmond said in a statement.

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