Melanoma

Beware! Antioxidants can cause cancer to spread faster

A new study suggests that people with cancer or an elevated risk of developing the disease should avoid nutritional supplements that contain antioxidants.

Antioxidants double the rate of metastasis, the spread of cancer from one part of the body to another, in malignant melanoma, the most perilous type of skin cancer, warns a new study.

Found in many nutritional supplements, antioxidants are widely marketed as a means of preventing cancer.

The results of this study suggest that people with cancer or an elevated risk of developing the disease should avoid nutritional supplements that contain antioxidants.

“We have demonstrated that antioxidants promote the progression of cancer,” said one of the researchers Martin Bergo from Sahlgrenska Academy at University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

Antioxidants protect healthy cells from free radicals that can turn them into malignancies but may also protect a tumour once it has developed, the findings showed.

Researchers at Sahlgrenska Academy demonstrated in January 2014 that antioxidants hastened and aggravated the progression of lung cancer.

Mice that were given antioxidants developed additional and more aggressive tumours.

Experiments on human lung cancer cells confirmed the results. Given well-established evidence that free radicals can cause cancer, the research community had simply assumed that antioxidants, which destroy them, provide protection against the disease.

But because the lung cancer studies called the collective wisdom into question, they attracted a great deal of attention.

The follow-up studies at Sahlgrenska Academy have now found that antioxidants double the rate of metastasis in malignant melanoma in mice. “The antioxidant boosted the ability of the tumour cells to metastasise, an even more serious problem because metastasis is the cause of death in the case of melanoma. The primary tumour is not dangerous per se and is usually removed,” Bergo noted.

Experiments on cell cultures from patients with malignant melanoma confirmed the new results.

Source: India today

U.S. approves Merck immune-stimulating drug for melanoma

U.S. regulators on Thursday approved the use of Merck & Co Inc’s immuno-oncology drug Keytruda, also known as pembrolizumab, as a treatment for patients with advanced melanoma who are no longer responding to other therapies.

U.S. approves Merck immune-stimulating drug for melanoma

The decision marks the first U.S. approval for a promising new class designed to help the body’s own immune system fend off cancer by blocking a protein known as Programmed Death receptor (PD-1), or a related target known as PD-L1, used by tumors to evade disease-fighting cells.

For Tom Stutz, a 74-year-old retired lawyer living in Southern California, the Merck drug has meant a new lease on life. “I was really ready to mail it in,” before entering a pembrolizumab trial in April 2012 after melanoma had spread to his lungs, liver and back, he said.

Stutz, who still receives an infusion of the drug every three weeks, said he has “gone from not being able to turn over in bed, to being able to play tennis three days a week, and ride a bike 25 miles a day.”

He said side effects amounted to some itching.

“This is not a drug that attacks the cancer directly. It enables the immune system to do the job that it is capable of doing,” said Dr. Louis Weiner, director of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University. “This is the first beachhead that’s been taken. It’s going to be all out assault on many different types of cancer.”

Merck and others, including Bristol-Myers Squibb, Roche Holding AG and AstraZeneca Plc, are racing to develop PD-1 pathway drugs as treatments for a variety of cancers, including lung cancer. Some analysts expect the new class could generate more than $30 billion in annual sales worldwide by 2025.

Melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, kills around 10,000 Americans each year, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The FDA said clinical trials of Keytruda showed that it shrank tumors in around 24 percent of patients with advanced melanoma whose disease worsened after prior treatment.

The agency had designated the drug a “breakthrough therapy,” and approved it nearly two months ahead of an Oct. 28 decision deadline. Reuters reported exclusively last week that the approval was likely to come far earlier than the deadline [L1N0R52D3].

Keytruda is the sixth new melanoma drug approved by the FDA since 2011.

“This is a patient population with few options … We are highly encouraged by the response rate and the duration of response,” said Dr Rick Pazdur, director of the Office of Hematology and Oncology in the FDA’s drug evaluation center. “The true benefit of these drugs may be in patients who do not have metastatic disease, but are at risk of recurrence.”

Merck said one of its first priorities was to see whether the drug is effective in patients with earlier-stage cancer.

Keytruda will be priced at about $12,500 per month, which “is consistent with other innovative oncology medicines,” Merck said. For patients with advanced melanoma, the median duration of treatment has been 6.2 months.

Common side effects of Keytruda seen during clinical trials included fatigue, cough, nausea, itchy skin, rash and diarrhea. Because it stimulates the immune system, Keytruda has the potential for severe immune-mediated side effects, including liver problems and colitis.

Merck is studying the drug in more than 30 different types of tumors, said Roger Perlmutter, head of research at the pharmaceutical company. Merck expects to present data from studies in lung, bladder and gastric cancers at a European medical meeting later this month.

Perlmutter said Merck’s next FDA filing for Keytruda will depend on which trials “yield the most powerful results.”

Bristol expects to complete by the end of this year a “rolling” submission for FDA approval of its drug, Opdivo, or nivolumab, for certain patients with late-stage lung cancer. The company also plans to file an FDA application by the end of this month for use of the drug, which is approved in Japan, for patients with advanced melanoma.

Source: reuters

Blue Pill May Boost Risk of Deadly Skin Cancer, Study Finds

Men who use Viagra to get a boost in the bedroom could find that the little blue pill also increases the risk of developing melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, a preliminary study finds.

Researchers found that men who took sildenafil, best known as Viagra, were about 84 percent more likely to develop melanoma than men who didn’t take the drug.

Because it’s just one early study, no one is suggesting that men stop taking Viagra to treat erectile dysfunction, said Dr. Abrar Qureshi, professor and chair of the dermatology department in the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University.

“But people who are on the medication and who have a high risk for developing melanoma may consider touching base with their primary care providers,” said Qureshi, co-author of the study of nearly 26,000 men published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Viagra may increase the risk of melanoma because it affects the same genetic pathway that allows the skin cancer to become more invasive, Qureshi said. Those who took the drug weren’t at higher risk of other, less-dangerous skin cancers, such as basal cell or squamous cell cancers.

About 76,100 new melanoma cases are expected to be diagnosed in the U.S. in 2014, and about 9,710 people will die, including about 6,470 men.

Qureshi and colleagues at several sites in the U.S. and China analyzed data about Viagra use and skin cancer from the Health Professionals’ Follow-up Study, a long-term study of male doctors and other health care workers.

The average age of men in the study was 65 and about 6 percent had taken Viagra to treat erectile dysfunction. If men had ever used Viagra, the risk of developing melanoma was about double than for those who never used the drug. That finding held true even when the researchers adjusted for a family history of skin cancer, ultraviolet light exposure in the states where the men lived, other kinds of cancer and major illnesses and other factors.

Primary care doctors who treat older men taking Viagra should check their patients for signs of skin cancer, said Dr. June Robinson of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, who wrote an accompanying editorial.

She cautioned that the rate of increase in new melanoma cases in men actually slowed after Viagra entered the market in 1998, raising a “cautionary note” about the impact of sildenafil on melanoma.

“But its role in the biological behavior of melanoma in older men warrants further study,” she said.

Source: NBC news

Men living alone at high skin cancer death risk

Living alone? You may be at a higher risk of death from skin cancer, especially if you are male, an alarming study claims.

Single men of all ages are more likely to die of cutaneous malignant melanoma – a most aggressive form of skin cancer – as there are differences in prognosis depending on cohabitation status and gender.

“We are able to show that living alone among men is significantly associated with a reduced melanoma-specific survival, partially attributed to a more advanced stage at diagnosis,” said Hanna Eriksson from department of oncology-pathology at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

“Our study shows that this applies to men of all ages, regardless of their level of education and place of residence,” Eriksson added.

By using the unique data from the Swedish Melanoma Register, researchers from Karolinska Institutet and Linkoping University made a detailed study of the link between the prognosis of cutaneous malignant melanoma and whether the patient lives alone or with a partner.

The researchers examined the risk of dying from melanoma among more than 27,000 melanoma patients in relation to their cohabitation status at the time of diagnosis.

The analysis looked into factors already known to affect the prognosis such as the characteristics of the tumour, gender, educational level and body site of the tumour was.

The researchers also found that older women living alone have a more advanced disease at diagnosis but for single living women as a group, there was no effect on the melanoma-specific prognosis.

According to the researchers, one possible explanation, particularly for the men and older women diagnosed with melanoma in later stages, are differences in taking on board information about the disease.

But it could also relate to insufficient access to skin examinations, said the study published in the scientific Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Source: Times of India

Skin cancer may up risk of other cancers

People who have had common skin cancers may be at an increased risk of developing melanoma and 29 other cancer types, a new study has warned. Individuals who had nonmelanoma skin cancer (NMSC) were at increased risk for subsequently developing other cancer types, and this association was much higher for those under 25 years of age, researchers said.

NMSC is the most common type of skin cancer. It is relatively easy to treat if detected early, and rarely spreads to other organs, they said. “Our study shows that NMSC susceptibility is an important indicator of susceptibility to malignant tumours and that the risk is especially high among people who develop NMSC at a young age,” said Rodney Sinclair, professor of medicine at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

“The risk increases for a large group of seemingly unrelated cancers; however, the greatest risk relates to other cancers induced by sunlight, such as melanoma,” said Sinclair. Compared with people who did not have NMSC, those who did were 1.36 times more likely to subsequently develop any cancer, including melanoma and salivary gland, bone, and upper gastrointestinal cancers.

Survivors younger than 25 years of age, however, were 23 times more likely to develop any cancer other than NMSC. In particular, they were 94 and 93 times more likely to get melanoma and salivary gland cancer, respectively. “Our study identifies people who receive a diagnosis of NMSC at a young age as being at increased risk for cancer and, therefore, as a group who could benefit from screening for internal malignancy,” said Sinclair.

Researchers hypothesised that people who develop skin cancers later in life do so as a result of accumulated Sun exposure, while those who develop skin cancer at a younger age may do so as a result of an increased susceptibility to cancer in general. To investigate this, they stratified the risk ratios by age and discovered that young people with NMSC are more cancer-prone.

The researchers constructed two cohorts: one of 502,490 people with a history of NMSC, and a cohort of 8,787,513 people who served as controls. They followed up with the participants electronically for five to six years, and 67,148 from the NMSC cohort and 863,441 from the control group subsequently developed cancers.

They found that for those who had NMSC, the relative risk for developing cancers of the bladder, brain, breast, colon, liver, lung, pancreas, prostate, and stomach remained consistently elevated for the entire period of the study, and the risk for cancers of the brain, colon, and prostate increased with time.

The study was published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Bio-markers & Prevention.

Source: Indian Express

Heavy drinking may ‘increase skin cancer risk by more than half

Heavy drinking can increase the risk of developing the deadliest form of skin cancer by more than half, researchers have warned.

Downing three or four drinks a day does more than make us careless about getting sunburnt, it causes biological changes which make the body more sensitive to sun, they say.

Even one drink a day can raise the chance of getting melanoma by 20 per cent; for heavier drinkers the risk is raised by 55 per cent.

Researcher Dr Eva Negri said the mix of UV rays and alcohol damaged the body’s immune responses.

She added: ‘This can lead to far greater cellular damage and subsequently cause skin cancers to form.

‘This study aimed to quantify the extent to which the melanoma risk is increased with alcohol intake and we hope that, armed with this knowledge, people can better protect themselves.’

The warnings, published in the British Journal of Dermatology, are based on a review of 16 other studies and 6,251 cases of melanoma.

The researchers admit they do not know exactly how drinking increases the cancer risk. But they found alcohol is turned into a chemical called acetaldehyde soon after it is consumed and that makes the skin more sensitive to sunlight.

Leading dermatologist Prof Chris Bunker said: ‘Brits haven’t always been known for their moderation when it comes to either alcohol or the sun but this research provides people with further information to make informed choices about their health.’

Source: Metro news

 

Radiation from airport body scanner detect signs of skin cancer

Airport security screening check points has great potential for looking underneath human skin to diagnose cancer at its earliest

Terahertz radiation, the technology that peeks underneath clothing at airport security screening check points has great potential for looking underneath human skin to diagnose cancer at its earliest and most treatable stages, a researcher has revealed.

Anis Rahman , Ph.D., explained that malignant melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer , starts in pigment-producing cells located in the deepest part of the epidermis. Biochemical changes that are hallmarks of cancer occur in the melanocytes long before mole-like melanomas appear on the skin.

Rahman said that terahertz radiation- form of ‘non-ionizing’ radiation- is ideal for looking beneath the skin and detecting early signs of melanoma.

T-rays can be focused harmlessly below into the body and capture biochemical signatures of events like the start of cancer.

Rahman, president and chief technology officer of Applied Research and Photonics in Harrisburg, Pa., described research focusing T-rays through donated samples of human skin that suggest the technology could be valuable in diagnosing melanoma.

In addition to developing T-rays for cancer diagnostics, Rahman’s team has successfully harnessed them to measure the real-time absorption rates and penetration in the outer layer of skin of topically applied drugs and shampoo.

Other wide-ranging applications include the detection of early stages of tooth decay, trace pesticides on produce, flaws in pharmaceutical tablet coatings, and concealed weapons under clothing, as well as testing the effectiveness of skin cosmetics.

The research was presented at National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

 

Source: Zee news