Mesothelioma Pain Control With Radiation Therapy

Mesothelioma pain control is essential for being able to live every moment to the fullest. To do that it is essential that your medical team help you manage mesothelioma pain (Pain management is also called palliative care). The goal of mesothelioma pain control is simply to relieve pain, reduce symptoms and optimize the quality of life. As the illness progresses, pain may unfortunately increase and may not respond to the usual pain medications. An alternative to consider with your physician is radiation therapy.

Why Mesothelioma Pain Control Works With Radiation Therapy

Radiation therapy uses X-rays to destroy cancer cells and shrink tumors. Radiation damages the genetic material inside the cells in the area being treated. This makes it impossible for the cells to continue to grow. Radiation can damage normal cells as well as cancer cells, but the normal cells repair themselves. The cancer cells do not.

Radiation can help with mesothelioma pain control by destroying a growing tumor that is invading or interfering with normal tissue. Pain results when a tumor presses on bones, nerves, or other organs and destroying the tumor with radiation can relieve this pain. This may be done with radiation to part of the body or, in rare cases, with radiation to the whole body. Another method uses injections with radioactive medicine. Often only a single treatment is needed to relieve pain.

Possible Side Effects of Radiation for Mesothelioma Pain Control

While mesothelioma pain control is an important goal, the possible side effects common to radiation therapy need to be anticipated. These side effects usually go away after radiation therapy is over and in some instances, can be minimized with medication.

Side effects may include:

    Tiredness
    Loss of hair near a treated area
    Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea
    Appetite loss
    Reddened or darkened skin in the area exposed to a beam of radiation
    Sore throat (with neck or chest radiation)

Mesothelioma Pain Control with Two Types of Radiation Therapy

Mesothelioma pain control is treated with either of two types of radiation therapy:

    External radiation beam therapy
    Internal radiation therapy with radioactive injections

External radiation therapy is the most common type of radiation treatment. The radiation beam is directed at the area affected by mesothelioma from outside the body. It is similar to having an X-ray taken. You may have a single treatment or a series of daily treatment sessions every one to two weeks.

You can’t feel the radiotherapy. It doesn’t hurt but you may find it uncomfortable to lie in one position for the duration of the treatment. You can ask your doctor or nurse if you can take a pain reliever half an hour before your appointment if you think it might help.

Internal radiation therapy may be suggested by your oncologist. This involves an injection of a very small amount of radioactive material. The treatment is targeted to where you need it most. It is only a small amount but can work well for mesothelioma pain control.

How well does radiation therapy control mesothelioma pain?

Mesothelioma pain control with radiation therapy generally achieves good results. It may take several weeks to work fully.

Some studies report that about 3 out of 10 people (30%) will have no pain within a month of radiotherapy treatment. For at least another 4 out of 10 (40%) people, the treatment reduces the pain by half. That means about 7 out of 10 people (70%) experience anywhere from no pain to half as much pain after radiotherapy treatment.

It typically takes between one and four weeks for radiation therapy to start to reduce pain. The pain relief may last for up to 18 months.

You will need to keep taking pain relief medication at first. But within a few weeks, you may be able to cut down on the amount of pain medication you take. Ask your doctor or nurse about how to safely reduce your pain medication as the radiotherapy treatment results take effect.

If your first course of mesothelioma pain control radiation therapy doesn’t work well, your doctor may recommend that you have a second course. You may also have a second course if the pain gets better, but then comes back again.

source: mesotheliomacircle.org

Actress Lindsay Lohan’s community service questioned in court

LOS ANGELES - A Los Angeles judge on Wednesday gave a prosecutor more time to investigate whether actress Lindsay Lohan failed to complete her community service requirements in a reckless driving case.

Santa Monica city prosecutor Terry White will present his findings in court on Feb. 18 after disputing Lohan's claim that she completed her sentence while living in London, Lohan's attorney, Shawn Holley, said.

The 28-year-old "Mean Girls" star was ordered to complete 30 days of community service in addition to rehabilitation and therapy as part of a 2013 plea deal after she crashed her Porsche into a dump truck near Los Angeles en route to the set of TV movie "Liz & Dick" and later lied to police.

The former child star known more for her legal troubles than big-screen roles has been living in London where Holley says she has completed her community service.

White alleges Lohan, who was not at the hearing, received credit for a "meet-and-greet" with fans as well as letting two young people shadow her while at work, according to City News Service.

Lohan has been arrested in the past for drunk driving and theft before the 2012 car crash. She has been on probation since 2007 and gone to rehab six times. —Reuters

Last-resort leukemia treatment produces dramatic remission rate

NEW YORK - Ninety percent of people facing death because conventional treatments had failed to destroy their leukemia have responded to an experimental therapy that trains their cells to kill out-of-control blood cells, doctors in Philadelphia report.

Twenty seven of the 25 children and 5 adults initially responded to the new therapy. Nineteen - including a 9-year-old treated two and a half years ago - have remained cancer-free and 15 of those 19 have not receive any subsequent therapy.

"We're astonished how well it turned out," senior author Dr. Stephan Grupp of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia told Reuters Health. Doctors are often happy if a treatment can improve the remission rate by 3 percent to 5 percent. "In our wildest dreams, we didn't think it would work as well as it did for the patients we've treated so far," Grupp said.

"It's equally impressive in both the adult and pediatric population," said Dr. Noelle Frey of the University of Pennsylvania, who directed the adult portion of the study.

"These are patients where the chances of cure are close to zero, if not zero," she said. "This is a therapy that not only gives hope, but is also correlated with tremendous success."

The treatment results, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, are part of a broader effort to reprogram the cells of cancer patients so they reproduce rapidly and attack the rogue cells responsible for tumors.

"If this has curative potential - which we don't know yet, but seems to be the case - it's a game changer," said Dr. Michael Sadelain of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, part of a separate team that previously used the technique to produce complete remissions in 14 out of 16 adults who had acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) of a stage "where nobody would go into complete remission."

"The good news is, this therapy can work just as well in children as it was reported to do in adults," he told Reuters Health.

In the Philadelphia study, other treatments - as many as four - had failed in the 30 patients. Conventional therapy typically cures 80 percent to 85 percent of children with ALL and those children "don't need this," said Grupp. "The other 15 percent or so are candidates for this."

Adults with ALL are tougher to treat, "so 50 percent or more might need this," he said.

In July, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave the treatment, known as CTL019, a Breakthrough Therapy designation designed to expedite its development for ALL.

The Philadelphia researchers have also been experimenting with CTL019 for chronic lymphocytic leukemia and Hodgkin's lymphoma,. The remission rates in those tests have been high, but not nearly as high as with ALL, Frey told Reuters Health. Those findings have not been published.

The ALL treatment involves training disease-fighting blood cells known as T-cells. Once removed from a patient's body, they are programmed to hunt cancer cells that have a telltale protein on their surface. The specially-trained cells are then re-injected into the patient. The re-engineering process currently costs about $25,000.

Of the initial 30 patients, 27 were in complete remission by the one-month mark, but seven relapsed over a period ranging from 6 weeks to 8.5 months after treatment. Twenty three were alive at the six-month mark. Five of the 23 left the study to receive other treatments, including stem cell transplantation.

The treatment is not without serious risks. The most common is cytokine release syndrome, where the body appears to react to the mass killing of tumor cells.

Patients "become tired, achy and nauseous," said Frey. "You can also get low blood pressure and breathing difficulties. Unfortunately, it can be life-threatening. But we have, in most cases, been able to reverse it. Yet in most situations it’s very manageable."

“For our patients who have already relapsed after stem cell transplants, or don’t have any options for donors," she said, "this option has provided new hope.”

In eight of the 27 cases where there was a response, cytokine release syndrome was judged to be severe and the patients ended up in intensive care.

At least part of the technique involved in the Philadelphia study has been licensed to Novartis. Sloan Kettering has teamed up with a start-up company, Juno Therapeutics, which will conduct a multicenter study of adults with ALL, Sadelain said.

"That's a sea change in the field because, until now, this realm of cell therapy was almost exclusively in the hands of academic centers," he said. "Now you see a whole host of companies moving into this space. Investors have been impressed by these results and will take them far beyond what academic centers will do." — Reuters

Stem cell advance boosts prospects for retina treatment

PARIS - Blind mice have been able to see once more in a laboratory exploit that marks a further boost for the fast-moving field of retinal therapy, according to a study published on Sunday.

Scientists in Britain used stem cells—early-stage, highly versatile cells—taken from mice embryos, and cultured them in a lab dish so that they differentiated into immature photoreceptors, the light-catching cells in the retina.

Around 200,000 of these cells were then injected into the mice's retinas, some of which integrated smoothly with local cells to restore sight.

The rodents were put through their paces in a water maze and examined by optometry to confirm that they responded to light.

Embryonic stem cells "could in future provide a potentially unlimited supply of health photoreceptors for retinal transplantations to treat blindness in humans," Britain's Medical Research Council (MRC) said in a press release.

Photoreceptor loss lies behind degenerative eye diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration, also called AMD.

Stem cells have triggered a huge interest and investment on the back of hopes that they can become replacement tissue, grown in a lab dish, for cells damaged by disease or accident.

But the exciting field has to overcome big obstacles.

One is the ability to coax these immature cells into safely becoming the specialised cells that are needed, rather than turn cancerous.

This is where the new work marks a gain, according to lead researcher Robin Ali at the University College London Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Hospital.

His team previously found that sight could be restored in blind mice by transplanting immature photoreceptors called rod cells that were taken from the retinas of healthy rodents.

The latest research takes things further because the transplanted material comprises all the different nerve cells needed for sight—and they were not taken from other animals.

Instead, they were grown in a lab and differentiated into the right cells thanks to a new technique, pioneered in Japan, that replicates the shape of the retina.

"Over recent years, scientists have become pretty good at working with stem cells and coaxing them to develop into different types of adult cells and tissues," said Ali.

"But until recently, the complex structure of the retina has proved difficult to reproduce in the lab. This is probably because the type of cell culture we were using was not able to recreate the developmental process that would happen in a normal embryo."

Ali added: "The next step will be to refine this technique using human cells to enable us to start clinical trials."

The study appears in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Last month, Japanese authorities approved proposals for the world's first clinical trials using stem cells harvested from a patient's own body.

The goal is to test therapy for AMD using so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS.

These are adult cells that have been reprogrammed to return to their infant, versatile state. Provided that they are proven safe, they can provide a non-controversial alternative to stem cells culled from early-stage embryos. —Agence France-Presse

source: gmanetwork.com

iPad-addicted toddlers found to suffer withdrawal, require therapy

 

Toddlers who are allowed access to tablet devices for extended periods of time everyday are in danger of suffering from long-term effects, experts have observed.

 

 

In the UK, a four-year-old girl became increasingly “distressed and inconsolable” whenever her parents took her iPad away from her. The child, the youngest known to ever require treatment for this particular condition, has since then been receiving compulsive behavior therapy, according to The Telegraph.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Escalated use

The parents told the doctors that, in the span of a year, the amount of time their daughter spent on the iPad had escalated to up to four hours daily.

“The child's mother called me and described her symptoms,” said Dr. Richard Graham, who three years ago established the first technology addiction program in the UK. “She told me she had developed an obsession with the device and would ask for it constantly. She was using it three to four hours every day and showed increased agitation if it was removed.”

He believes there are many other children who have become addicted to iPads and mobile phones. When these devices are taken away from the young technology addicts, they experience the same withdrawal symptoms as drug addicts and alcoholics.

'Digital detox'

Dr. Graham warns parents that this condition could seriously interfere with a child’s ability to form normal social relationships, so that something as natural as human interaction could become exhausting for him or her.

“Children have access to the internet almost from birth now,” he said. “They see their parents playing on their mobile devices and they want to play too. It's difficult, because having a device can also be very useful in terms of having a reward, having a pacifier. But if you don't get the balance right it can be very dangerous.

“They can't cope and become addicted, reacting with tantrums and uncontrollable behavior when they are taken away. Then as they grow older, the problem only gets worse. Even the most shy kids, when they hit their teens, suddenly want to become sociable and popular.”

London’s Capio Nightingale clinic is the site of the 28-day treatment program, called “digital detox”. Designed by Dr Graham to specifically treat children suffering from addiction to technology, it can cost up to £16,000 —or over P1 million.

Troubling trends

Over the past three years, the number of people who have become dependent on this type of technology has risen by 30 per cent, according to psychiatrists.

A recent UK survey revealed a disturbing statistic: over half of parents allow their very young children to play with digital gadgets.

 

 

Babies.co.uk questioned more than 1,000 parents about their babies’ use of these devices. One in seven of them confessed that they allowed their babies to use tablets and smartphones for up to four hours a day, or more.

 

“Given that babies between 3-12 months are awake for only around 10 hours per day this is a huge proportion of their waking day,” said the managing director of the website, James Macfarlane. “Although 81 per cent of our users felt that children today spend too much time on smart devices, it hasn’t put most of them off using them to entertain their baby.” — TJD, GMA News

 

source: gmanetwork.com