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Mesothelioma is a very aggressive cancer with a poor prognosis. When diagnosed, patients can sometimes be given just a few months to live. Doctors and researchers are continuing to find treatment options to help cure, extend, or at least make patients’ lives better. Some researchers are looking at biomarkers, which can help show doctors what…
There are different procedures to help those suffering from mesothelioma, including the extrapleural pneumonectomy and the combination of pleurectomy and decortication. Both procedures have their benefits and drawbacks, but doctors have not tested to see which procedure has a better outcome for patients. Both surgeries remove tumors from the patients’ bodies, but what is removed…
Researchers have possibly found a less invasive way to diagnose pleural mesothelioma. By looking at the patient’s medical history and using CT scans, researchers at the Universite Laval in Quebec have found that imaging technology can be used potentially to benefit very sick patients. Doctors have never been able to diagnose people with mesothelioma based…
Mesothelioma is a very rare and preventable cancer and because of this, many people do not know it exists or what causes it. Mesothelioma Awareness Day helps solve this by making people aware of the disease. Workers and families whose lives have been destroyed by the devastating effects of the disease can be celebrated and…
An immunotherapy treatment that utilizes T cells to fight cancer may soon be covered by Medicare for mesothelioma patients. Immunotherapy is still an emerging set of cancer treatments that utilizes the patient’s own immune system to fight and kill cancer cells. The specific treatment that uses T cells is called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell…
Biomarkers are measureable substances that indicate if someone has a disease. Doctors and researchers are able to find different substances within a person’s body and deduce that the person has a specific type of cancer. Researchers have found a relatively new biomarker called microRNA, which could possibly be used to diagnose mesothelioma. MicroRNAs control gene…
Radiation therapy, which uses intense energy beams to kill cancer cells, is a very common treatment for cancer. There are different types of radiation, but the most common type is X-rays. Radiation is also useful for preventing cancer from returning, or stopping or slowing its growth. The radiation breaks up DNA inside cancer cells, preventing…
It was found that the number of pleural mesothelioma diagnoses has stayed the same, while the survival rate for people with the disease has slightly improved. Once asbestos was not used as much because of multiple regulations, the number of diagnoses of mesothelioma was predicted to go down. Instead, the number of diagnoses has remained…
According to a study done at The University of Texas at Dallas, the Ketogenic diet, which is very low in sugar, as well as the administration of a diabetes drug that prevents glucose in the blood from being adsorbed by the kidneys, slowed down the growth of squamous cell carcinoma tumors in mice. This specific…
Typical cancer treatments are hard on the body and are not always effective. When treating someone for cancer, chemotherapy is typically used, which kills cancer cells or stops them from growing or spreading. Chemotherapy can also kill healthy cells, which makes it hard on the body. Immunotherapy is another option, and it works by helping…
