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 »
So, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last 50 years, you know that sugar (as delicious as it is) is bad for you – addicting, fattening, and a whole host of other bad things that end in -ing. But now some smart people have also discovered that a modification of sugar in cells spurs on the spread… 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 »
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 »
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 »
In my previous post, I talked about how nanoparticles can deliver a payload of chemotherapy drugs in a targeted way, bypassing the anything other than cancer cells. Well, there’s another very interesting line of research involving nanoparticles. Nanoparticles are small, but they’re still larger than most human cells. But they are the perfect size to infiltrate cancer cells, which are… Read more »
OK, so y’all know I’m a science nerd, right? And there’s some really interesting research being done with nanoparticles to treat cancer. But I was always a little hazy on how exactly all of that worked. How did the nanoparticles find and target only the cancer cells and leave the regular cells untouched? I came across an explanation and thought… Read more »
As readers of the blog may know, I live in Austin. Our local television station ran a story about a new radiation-based skin cancer treatment that sounded interesting. The treatment is an FDA approved non-surgical treatment called Superficial Radiation. The claim is that the treatment destroys skin cancer cells without damaging healthy tissue. For maximum effectiveness, you need 8-10 treatments, which last… Read more »