Tag Archives: research

When a Supplement Might Actually Harm

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About a decade or so ago, people with joint pain were told that chondroitin sulfate along with glucosamine might help to reduce or elevate their pain. Others started taking the supplements to prevent joint pain. It became one of the most popular supplements in the world because of its supposed benefits. But the thing is, there haven’t been any definitive proof… Read more »

Maybe Consistency isn’t Always Good

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Being consistent with good eating habits, drinking those glasses of water, and exercising is supposed to be good for you (I wouldn’t know because I’m unable to do all three of those things consistently). But in melanoma treatment, consistency may not always be a good thing, at least according to recently published research. Combining various drug treatments has been at… Read more »

Are Your Eyes an Indicator of Your Melanoma Risk?

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So there’s an article released yesterday that basically says that if you have a pigmented lesion in your iris (the colored part of your eye), you have an increased likelihood of developing melanoma. I wanted to run to the mirror and stare at my irises but because I am at work, I figured I would avoid the awkward conversation in… Read more »

Repurposed Drugs an Option to Fight Melanoma

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Been a little quiet on the blog as I have been slammed with work stuff and still trying to recover from whatever that second virus-head-cold thing was. It’s SXSW in Austin and the sleep deficit I’m carrying isn’t going to be wiped out anytime soon. But I did see an interesting story I wanted to share. Researchers at the University… Read more »

The Ugly Duckling Rule

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Malignant melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer. To readers of this blog, that shouldn’t come as any surprise. And for years, we’ve been taught the ABCDE rules on detecting melanoma. A stands for asymmetry; B is for borders so anything with ill-defined borders is suspect; C is for the color and whether the mole or lesion has more… Read more »

The Protective Benefits of Pregnancy

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Science is really cool… and a new research study from the team at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (an Ivy League school, BTW) thinks it may have the answer on why women with a history of a previous pregnancy statistically end up with better outcomes after a melanoma diagnosis. I’m going to quote a passage on… Read more »

How Early to Start Protecting Skin From the Sun?

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I just read an interesting article regarding how early should you think about protecting your skin from the sun. Now, I have some issues with the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force for their lack of recommending annual skin exams; but this time, they are recommending physicians talk to parents of young, fair-skinned children even earlier than previously recommended. Want to know… Read more »

Don’t Just Look for Changes in Moles

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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 »

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 »