Category Archives: Cancer News

News about cancer, skin cancer or otherwise

Melanoma Story from My Own Backyard

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I am not a morning person. I blame that on the fact that I was born around noon and my internal clock was then set for me to be an afternoon-type person. So, I missed the recent story on the Today Show (which airs when I’m still stumbling around semi-coherently in the morning getting ready for work) about an Austin woman… Read more »

Sad Story from Tampa

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In a recent news story out of Tampa, a widow describes how she lost her husband to amelanotic melanoma. Spreading from a lesion on his calf into the lymph system, the cancer ended up claiming the man’s life after a 3-year battle against the disease. He had a lump in his groin that signified the spread of the cancer and… Read more »

Can a Compound “Cure” Cancer?

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I got all alliterative on the title there… but I’m really excited to share a story I read about research that uses a compound treatment to target melanoma cells but spares the healthy skin cells. The research was led by two scientists working out of Penn State College of Medicine and was recently published in the European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. As noted… Read more »

One More Reason for Radon Detectors

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You may have heard of radon. It’s a colorless, tasteless, odorless gas – meaning if it’s around you, you really have no way of knowing it’s there without a detector. Why do you need to be concerned about it? Well, for one thing – it’s radioactive. It’s on par with plutonium in that it releases alpha particles. (I know way… Read more »

Saving the Lymph Nodes

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A recent study shows that the standard procedure of removing all of the lymph nodes located near a tumor actually doesn’t help melanoma patients live longer. Ordinarily, if a patient presents with melanoma in a lymph node, some doctors would opt for a procedure called completion lymph node dissection, which basically means all of the lymph nodes near the affected… Read more »

New Blood Tests for Detecting the Presence of Skin Cancer

I just saw a very interesting article that highlights how researchers have developed a blood test to look for markers of melanoma DNA in a patient’s blood. The tests take only 48 hours to run (which is a pretty short timeframe), and as we all know, the quicker you can treat melanoma, the better the survival rates. So what this test… Read more »

Artificial Intelligence Might be the Next Frontier for Skin Cancer Detection

I mentioned in a previous post that I work for a big data platform company, which I am hopeful can be used to really allow data to help make people’s lives better, healthier, and safer. One of the recent articles that has come out regarding artificial intelligence has a deeply personal aspect, skin cancer detection. Now, I know I wrote… Read more »

World Cancer Day 2017

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It’s February 4, 2017 and that means that it’s World Cancer Day. As I’ve written about right after my excision and then last year, it’s a weird day for me. I’m never sure if I even should count myself among the cancer survivors since I (so far, knock wood) have only had to deal with getting the excision. I realize… Read more »

But I Drink Red Wine…

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Not sure if many of you saw the recent study that shows an increased risk of melanoma for white wine drinkers. I tried to find the least technical article to break down what the study results actually say, and I think this one from Forbes does the trick. In summary, the writer of the article (who’s a professor of biomedical… Read more »