These days, with a computer and a 3-D printer you can manufacture at home all kinds of things — shoes, toys, equipment and even a handgun that shoots real bullets. What you cannot make is a pair of mesothelioma-free human lungs. Yet. At this very moment, scientists are striving to add to the growing list of
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Mesothelioma pain is one of the unfortunate consequences of living with this dread cancer. You don’t need to be told how bad it can get. To quell mesothelioma pain, your doctor can prescribe drugs or offer to enroll you in an alternative-medicine program. The mesothelioma pain relief you experience from the available options can be
Keep an eye on the investigational enzyme PEGPH20. It wasn’t developed to treat mesothelioma, per se. However, it might emerge as an important companion medication you’ll someday take to increase the effectiveness of your mesothelioma chemotherapy treatments. Right now, PEGPH20 is being targeted for use in cases of non-small cell lung cancer and pancreatic cancer.
You undergo a mesothelioma biopsy for three reasons. The first is to give you a mesothelioma diagnosis so you can know whether you have the cancer. The second is to determine your mesothelioma stage so your doctors can develop an appropriate treatment plan. And the third is to tell whether the mesothelioma treatment you’ve been
Evidence continues to accumulate suggesting that extrapleural pneumonectomy preceded by radiation therapy is a safe and effective treatment for appropriate malignant pleural mesothelioma patients. The latest data showing this to be the case comes from researchers who spoke at the annual meeting of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery in Seattle. The researchers — from Toronto
PARD3 is a gene that is supposed to prevent mesothelioma tumors from developing. Yet, somehow, the tumor suppressor ends up itself being suppressed so that mesothelioma and other lung cancers can get started and keep growing. This finding was reported in the journal Cancer Research by researchers at Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute near Barcelona, Spain.
A new understanding of the structure of DNA may someday allow your doctor to tell if you’re going to be stricken by mesothelioma long before it happens — perhaps as much as a decade ahead of time. Super-early warning would be a massive advantage because it might give you time to make medical decisions and lifestyle
One of the challenges scientists face when trying to develop an effective gene therapy for mesothelioma is figuring out how to get lab-modified immune system cells to the site of the mesothelioma tumor. It’s not enough to simply inject or infuse you with the good guy cells. The therapeutic agent also has to be able
One of the first mesothelioma diagnosis tests you’ll be given when your doctor suspects you’ve got the deadly cancer is thoracentesis. This test cytologically analyzes a sample of the pleural fluid in your lungs to see whether it contains telltale traces of mesothelioma. Unfortunately, the mesothelioma diagnostic yield of thoracentesis isn’t usually as bountiful as
Extended pleurectomy/decortication yields greater improvement to a patient’s quality of life if the surgical procedure is performed when significant mesothelioma symptoms are present, as opposed to when there are none. These new findings come from University of Chicago researchers. The researchers also found that the quality-of-life improvements derived from extended pleurectomy/decortication — EPD — lasted for many
