I found an article that notes that although 99 out of 100 cases of skin cancer has a lesion that is found on the skin; there is a possibility that you could have skin cancer without a visible lesion. How? As Dr. Jeremy Davis, a clinical instructor and surgeon at UCLA Health explains, “It’s not common, but there are situations… Read more »
Because of my history of amelanotic nodular melanoma, I’m all too familiar with skin cancer arising out of a patch of clear skin. Apparently researchers agree that new skin spots are just as worthy of a dermatologist’s review than existing moles. The science behind this claim? Researchers reviewed 38 previously published medical studies involving more than 20,000 melanomas. Only 29%… Read more »
In one of my first posts, I talked about the different types of melanoma and where you can end up with a lesion (i.e. pretty much everywhere on the human body). A recent story put the spotlight on a little-known way melanoma can manifest – on a fingernail. In the story, a manicurist had a client that came in looking… Read more »
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 »
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 »
Well, I had my appointment with the dermatologist yesterday and as you may be able to guess from the title of this post, I didn’t get to walk out of there without more bits of my skin going off to pathology. When I got into the exam room, the assistant asked me if there were any spots of interest they… Read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »