Confronting Stigma From Opioid Use Disorder in Cancer Care
by Fitzgerald Jones, Ho, Sager, Rosielle and MerlinHave you ever been so distressed by a perspective piece that it kept you up at night? The type of rumination that fills you with so much angst that you have no choice but to act. This is exactly how we felt when we read theAAHPM Quarterly Winter 2020 Let ’s Think About It Again.1 (member paywall)The column, which is structured as a sort of written debate in which two authors argue a clinical question, describes a case of a 45-year-old man with severe substance use disorder (SUD) recently diagnosed with extensive-stage small-cell lung cancer. He was offered aggr...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - January 30, 2021 Category: Palliative Care Tags: ftigerald jones ho merlin rosielle sager Source Type: blogs

The Potential for Senolytics and Other Senotherapies to Improve Outcomes in Cancer Therapies
Cellular senescence is a double-edged sword in the matter of cancer. The state of senescence is a growth arrest coupled with pressure to self-destruct and a call to the immune system to destroy the senescent cell. As such it serves as a first line of defense against cancer. Most cancer treatments force large numbers of cancerous cells into senescence, in addition to causing outright cell death, shutting down their ability to replicate. Unfortunately, the presence of too many senescent cells is harmful in and of itself, as their signaling produces chronic inflammation, disrupts tissue function throughout the body, and makes...
Source: Fight Aging! - January 28, 2021 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs

Stomach Cancer Stage 4 Treatment
Stomach cancer stage 4 is a complex diagnosis. It is the stage of cancer that requires specific treatment options. Is surgery an option for patients with stomach cancer stage 4? Stage 4 stomach cancer is characterized by rapid tumor growth, metastasizing to regional lymph nodes and distant organs (liver, bones, pancreas, less often lungs). With the development of metastases in other organs, characteristic symptoms occur such as jaundice and liver failure with liver damage, ascites with metastases in the peritoneum, bowel obstruction with metastases in the small intestine, etc. Therefore, at the advanced stages, ga...
Source: PickTheBrain | Motivation and Self Improvement - January 22, 2021 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Booking Health Tags: health and fitness self-improvement cancer stomach cancer treatment Source Type: blogs

Magnetic Nanoparticles Deliver Chem and Heat Cancer Cells for Synergistic Effects
Researchers at University College London have shown that tiny magnetic nanoparticles could enhance cancer treatment. The particles can deliver chemotherapy drugs to cancer cells and also produce a mild heating effect when stimulated with an external alternating magnetic field. Combining particle-mediated heat treatment and chemotherapy resulted in synergistic effects in killing cancer cells, suggesting that the technology could be a useful tool in the fight against cancer. Nanoparticles offer enormous potential in creating targeted and highly effective anti-cancer treatments. This latest technology combines two differen...
Source: Medgadget - January 7, 2021 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Conn Hastings Tags: Materials Nanomedicine Oncology Source Type: blogs

Fight Aging! Newsletter, January 4th 2021
The objective of this study is to quantify the overall and cancer type-specific risks of subsequent primary cancers (SPCs) among adult-onset cancer survivors by first primary cancer (FPC) types and sex. Among 1,537,101 survivors (mean age, 60.4 years; 48.8% women), 156,442 SPC cases and 88,818 SPC deaths occurred during 11,197,890 person-years of follow-up (mean, 7.3 years). Among men, the overall risk of developing any SPCs was statistically significantly higher for 18 of the 30 FPC types, and risk of dying from any SPCs was statistically significantly higher for 27 of 30 FPC types as compared with risks in the general po...
Source: Fight Aging! - January 3, 2021 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs

Olanzapine FTW for Nausea Outside of CINV
by Drew Rosielle (@drosielle)A few months agoan interesting olanzapine study was published which I have been meaning to write a post about. It ' s important because while olanzapine has really established itself in the last decade as a highly effective antiemetic for chemotherapy induced nausea and vomiting, and is now in multiple CINV guidelines (eg Antiemetics: ASCO Guideline), etc, we don ' t have a lot of data for its efficacy for nausea outside of CINV, and so a well-done RCT is welcome.The study is amulti-center, US, adult, randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial of olanzapine for nausea in advanced cancer...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - January 1, 2021 Category: Palliative Care Tags: anorexia cachexia nausea olanzapine rosielle Source Type: blogs

A Look Back at 2020: Progress Towards the Treatment of Aging as a Medical Condition
While I suspect that COVID-19 will feature prominently in most retrospectives on 2020, I'll say only a little on it. The data on mortality by year end, if taken at face value, continues to suggest that the outcome will fall at the higher end of the early estimates of a pandemic three to six times worse than a bad influenza year, ten times worse than a normal influenza year. The people who die are near entirely the old, the co-morbid, and the immunocompromised. They die because they are suffering the damage and dysfunction of aging. Yet the societal conversation and the actions of policy makers ignore this. There is ...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 31, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Of Interest Source Type: blogs

Cancer Survivors Exhibit Greater Risk of New Cancers and Higher Mortality Due to those Cancers
The objective of this study is to quantify the overall and cancer type-specific risks of subsequent primary cancers (SPCs) among adult-onset cancer survivors by first primary cancer (FPC) types and sex. Among 1,537,101 survivors (mean age, 60.4 years; 48.8% women), 156,442 SPC cases and 88,818 SPC deaths occurred during 11,197,890 person-years of follow-up (mean, 7.3 years). Among men, the overall risk of developing any SPCs was statistically significantly higher for 18 of the 30 FPC types, and risk of dying from any SPCs was statistically significantly higher for 27 of 30 FPC types as compared with risks in the general po...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 29, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs

Getting a second opinion can save lives. It is time we make Miranda rights for patients.
The Lebanese-born former American oncologist Farid Fata committed one of the most malicious acts of greed by a medical professional in recorded history. Fata spent six years telling otherwise healthy people that they had cancer and needed immediate chemotherapy. He then fraudulently billed over $34 million in charges to Medicare and private insurance companies. Fata […]Find jobs at  Careers by KevinMD.com.  Search thousands of physician, PA, NP, and CRNA jobs now.  Learn more. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - December 27, 2020 Category: General Medicine Authors: < span itemprop="author" > < a href="https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/robert-trent" rel="tag" > Robert Trent < /a > < /span > Tags: Physician Primary Care Source Type: blogs

3 Patient Lessons: What Cancer Patients Teach Me
By YASMIN ASVAT An estimated 1.8 million people in this country may face a cancer diagnosis this year, in what has already been a bleak year of isolation and loss.   While news of the COVID-19 vaccine rolling out across the U.S. offers hope in a year of 311,000 deaths,  11 million  people face the financial pressure of unemployment, and, approximately 43 percent of the nation reports some symptoms of anxiety or depression.   It is understandable that a cancer diagnosis now may be too much to bear. And yet, somehow, many patients cope with t...
Source: The Health Care Blog - December 22, 2020 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Christina Liu Tags: COVID-19 Medical Practice Patients Physicians Source Type: blogs

Fight Aging! Newsletter, December 21st 2020
In this study, we have found that administration of a specific Sgk1 inhibitor significantly reduces the dysregulated form of tau protein that is a pathological hallmark of AD, restores prefrontal cortical synaptic function, and mitigates memory deficits in an AD model. These results have identified Sgk1 as a potential key target for therapeutic intervention of AD, which may have specific and precise effects." Targeting histone K4 trimethylation for treatment of cognitive and synaptic deficits in mouse models of Alzheimer's disease Epigenetic aberration is implicated in aging and neurodegeneration. Using p...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 20, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs

Greater Senescent Cell Burden Correlates with a Worse Cervical Cancer Survival Rate
It is thought that the burden of senescent cells is likely correlated with survival in many cancers. Senescent cells cease to replicate and begin to secrete pro-growth, pro-inflammation signals. Most senescent cells are rapidly destroyed by the immune system, but this process slows with age and thus senescent cells accumulate. Cellular senescence does act to suppress cancer in its earliest stages, by removing those cells most likely to become cancerous. Once a significant number of senescent cells are present, however, their signaling begins to aid cancer growth. Thus we might expect to see that the application of senolyti...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 14, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

Fight Aging! Newsletter, December 7th 2020
In this study, except for the reduction in body weight, the aging characteristics related to epidermal and muscle tissue in mice were significantly ameliorated in the CR group compared with the control group. Additional studies have indicated that not stem cells themselves but the stem cell microenvironment is the key factor mediating stem cell activation, proliferation and differentiation. Mitochondrial dysfunction is an important factor leading to age-related muscular atrophy. Considering the dependence of skeletal muscle on ATP, loss of mitochondrial function, which can lead to a decrease in strength and enduranc...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 6, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs

A Tour of Longevity Industry Therapies Presently in Clinical Trials
The longevity industry is presently still quite young, a hundred and something companies that are largely still at the preclinical stage of development, most founded in the last couple of years. Even if we want to be broadly generous as to which companies and projects are to be included in our definition of the industry, no newly developed therapies to treat the mechanisms of aging have yet been approved by the FDA, although a few have made it to phase 3 clinical trials. This is just a matter of time, however; it can take a decade of hard work to go from an idea to an approved therapy, and very few longevity industry compa...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 1, 2020 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Longevity Industry Source Type: blogs

Microfluidic Device to Test Pancreatic Cancer Drugs
Certain varieties of pancreatic cancer exhibit multiple tumor cell subtypes that work, somewhat mysteriously, to quickly become resistant to chemotherapy agents. Researchers at Purdue University have now built a unique microfluidic device that can be used to test a cancer drug on multiple tumor cells subtypes. Using this technology the researchers believe that new drug therapies can be discovered and existing medicines used more effectively. “The drug discovery and screening process has been using one cancer cell subtype and studying how it interacts with neighboring non-cancer cells, but this may overestimate the eff...
Source: Medgadget - October 30, 2020 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Medgadget Editors Tags: Materials Medicine Source Type: blogs