We are now "Susans at Antonino Salon" specializing in Human Hair, Human Hair/Synthetic Blend and Synthetic wigs. I am an Oncology Nurse and Breast Cancer Survivor offering products for women undergoing Chemotherapy and Radiation Treatment since 1994. “The Fit of Custom Made. The Value of Custom Tailored.”
CALL us at 248.544.4287 for your FREE appointment on Monday and Tuesday from 10 AM to 4 PM. We are located within Antonino Salon, 191 Townsend, Birmingham, MI 48009.
Thursday, November 12, 2015
I have mouth sores from receiving chemotherapy. I've heard that something called "magic mouthwash" might help. What is it?
Magic mouthwash is the term given to a solution used to treat mouth sores (oral mucositis) caused by some forms of chemotherapy and radiation therapy.
Oral mucositis can be extremely painful and can result in an inability to eat, speak or swallow. Magic mouthwash provides some relief.
There are several versions of magic mouthwash. Some are available in pre-measured kits (First-Mouthwash BLM, First-BXN Mouthwash) that can be mixed together by pharmacists, while others are prepared to order by a pharmacist. If it's determined that magic mouthwash might be helpful, your doctor will write a prescription.
Magic mouthwash usually contains at least three of these basic ingredients:
An antibiotic to kill bacteria around the sore
An antihistamine or local anesthetic to reduce pain and discomfort
An antifungal to reduce fungal growth
A corticosteroid to treat inflammation
An antacid that helps ensure the other ingredients adequately coat the inside of your mouth
Most formulations of magic mouthwash are intended to be used every four to six hours, and to be held in your mouth for one to two minutes before being either spit out or swallowed. It's recommended that you don't eat or drink for 30 minutes after using magic mouthwash so that the medicine has time to produce an effect.
It's unclear how effective magic mouthwash is in treating oral mucositis. That's because of the lack of standardization in the formulations of mouthwash, and poorly designed studies done to gather data.
Side effects of magic mouthwash may include problems with taste, a burning or tingling sensation in the mouth, drowsiness, constipation, diarrhea, and nausea.
If you have mouth sores, discuss your options with your doctor. In addition to magic mouthwash, medications and other treatments may help relieve your discomfort.
A new research study led by Dr. Mark Clemons, oncologist and associate cancer research scientist at The Ottawa Hospital, has shown that a personalized approach to treating one of the most expected side-effects of chemotherapy is far more effective than the existing "one size fits all" set of guidelines. The randomized trial is published in the November 12 issue ofJAMA Oncology.
Nausea and vomiting are among the most feared side-effects of chemotherapy for cancer patients, and in some cases the symptoms can be so debilitating that patients stop treatment. To date, physicians have treated these side-effects with a range of anti-nausea drugs, following a set of set of established guidelines.
"Unfortunately, these guidelines don't take into account the personal factors that put patients at higher risk of nausea and vomiting," said Dr. Clemons, who is also an associate professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa. His study included 324 breast cancer patients receiving chemotherapy at The Ottawa Hospital and the Irving Greenburg Cancer Centre, . The study demonstrated that when personal risk factors for chemotherapy induced nausea and vomiting (e.g. age under 40, those with a history of pregnancy-associated morning sickness or travel sickness, or those with lower alcohol consumption) are taken into account when prescribing anti-emetic medications then nausea and vomiting control was significantly improved, when compared with standard physician choice of antiemetics.
"This is the first time it's been shown anywhere in the world that using personal risk factors significantly improves nausea and vomiting control," explained Dr. Clemons. "Anti-nausea drugs potentially have their own side-effects, and it's very expensive for the healthcare system to simply give them to every patient regardless of effectiveness. We think these findings can lead to a much better, much kinder, much gentler way of treating cancer patients."
The approach is also important because, some patients at particularly high risk still had poor control of nausea and vomiting despite "optimal" antiemetic prescribing. For these patients new treatment strategies need to be developed. On the other hand it is very likely that patients at low risk do nto require all the anti-sickness drugs currently recommended.
"These results are very straightforward, but they challenge the dogma of the way the guidelines are written," Dr. Clemons said. "It's very easy to simply follow a guideline. Now we're suggesting that physicians just ask their patients a few key questions first."
More information: "A Randomized Trial Comparing Risk Model Guided Antiemetic Prophylaxis to Physician's Choice in Patients Receiving Chemotherapy for Early Stage Breast Cancer" JAMA Oncology, 2015.
Blood test detects when hormone treatment for breast cancer stops working
Breast cancer patients with mutations in the estrogen receptor gene ESR1 are known to develop resistance to hormone therapy. A new study finds that resistance to hormone therapy usually evolves in the advanced stage of disease, suggesting …more
Scientists have developed a highly sensitive blood test that can spot when breast cancers become resistant to standard hormone treatment, and have demonstrated that this test could guide further treatment.
The test gives an early warning of resistance to aromatase inhibitors, which are used to treat women with oestrogen receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer, the most common kind.
A team at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust found that the test could detect mutations to the oestrogen receptor gene ESR1 - which conveys resistance to hormone treatment - specifically in women treated with aromatase inhibitors.
Detecting mutations in this gene from cancer DNA in the bloodstream could allow doctors to rapidly identify which patients are no longer benefiting from treatment and switch them to an alternative drug.
The work is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine today (Wednesday), and was funded by several organisations including the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at The Royal Marsden and The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), Breast Cancer Now, The Cridlan Ross Smith Charitable Trust and Cancer Research UK.
Researchers initially took blood samples from 171 women with ER-positive breast cancer, and then validated their results in three independent groups of patients.
They found that ESR1 mutations could be detected by an ultra-sensitive method known as multiplexed digital PCR analysis, which can read the genetic code of tiny amounts of DNA released by tumours.
This method proved able to detect DNA errors as sensitively as tumour biopsies, with 97 per cent matching between the two methods, and could in future remove the need for such an invasive procedure.
Researchers at the ICR and The Royal Marsden found that once ESR1 mutations were detected, mutated cancer cells multiplied and became the dominant type in the body - driving the disease to become more aggressive and progress rapidly.
Women who had breast cancers with ESR1 mutations were three times more likely to progress than those without.
The stage at which the cancer was treated had a huge influence over how cancers became resistant to aromatase inhibitors, which are used as standard after surgery in postmenopausal women with ER-positive breast cancer. Mutations in ESR1 only occurred in 6 per cent of patients first treated with aromatase inhibitors when their cancers had not spread, but in 36 per of patients when the disease had already spread round the body by the time the drugs were administered. The research suggests more advanced cancers evolve drug resistance much more readily, reinforcing the importance of early diagnosis and early treatment for cancer.
Study leader Dr Nicholas Turner, Team Leader in Molecular Oncology at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and Consultant Medical Oncologist at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, said:
"Looking for cancer DNA in the blood allows us to analyse the genetic changes in cancer cells without the need for invasive biopsies. Our study demonstrates how these so-called liquid biopsies can be used to track the progress of treatment in the most common type of breast cancer.
"The test could give doctors an early warning of treatment failure and, as clinical trials of drugs that target ESR1 mutations are developed, help select the most appropriate treatment for women with advanced cancer."
Professor Paul Workman, Chief Executive of The Institute of Cancer Research, London, said: "We are in a new era of personalised cancer medicine, and liquid biopsies offer the hope that treatment can be monitored and adapted according to the evolution of an individual patient's cancer.
"In the space of the last couple of years there has been astonishingly rapid progress in the development of liquid biopsies to detect specific cancer mutations in the bloodstream. I am excited by the prospects of these new tests and would like to see them assessed in clinical trials as soon as possible, so we can show that their use to adapt treatment can offer real benefits for cancer patients."
From left: Dr. Ding Cheng Gao, Kari Fischer, Dr. Vivek Mittal. Credit: Carlos Rene Perez
Breast cancer cells do not undergo a commonly accepted transformation in order to spread to distant organs such as the lungs, Weill Cornell Medicine investigators have found in a new study. This discovery may settle a longstanding debate about how cancers spread, the investigators say, and may profoundly change the way many forms of the disease are treated.
For more than a decade, many researchers have believed that a biological process that transforms the shape of cells that line cavities, organs and blood vessels in the body was necessary for metastasis. Epithelial to mesenchymal transition, or EMT, strips away the cells' ability to hold on tightly to their neighbors, allowing them to migrate throughout the body. During fetal development, EMT provides a way for cells in the embryo to travel long distances for the generation of complex organs and bony appendages. Cancer biologists in the early '90s discovered that a subpopulation of tumor cells behaved the same way, positing that EMT gave cancer cells "legs" upon which to crawl away from a tumor. But other scientists have questioned the theory, and a vigorous controversy has ensued.
In their study, published Nov. 11 in Nature, Weill Cornell Medicine investigators discovered that while EMT occurred in a small number of primary breast tumor cells, they were not involved in cancer metastasis. What's more, metastasis was derived from non-EMT cancer cells, contradicting the common theory about how cancers spread. About 90 percent of all cancer-related deaths are due to metastasis. Strikingly, the EMT status changed with the addition of chemotherapy. The recurrent lung metastases that appeared after chemotherapy treatment were from EMT tumor cells, indicating that that EMT contributes to the survival of chemoresistant tumor cells. Their findings may offer a more effective treatment strategy formetastatic breast cancer and many other kinds of cancer.
"EMT has been considered cancer's Achilles heel, and now we show that this is true, but not in the way many thought," said co-senior author Dr. Vivek Mittal, an associate professor of cell and developmental biology in cardiothoracic surgery and of cell and developmental biology at Weill Cornell Medicine, director of the institution's Neuberger Berman Foundation Lung Cancer Research Center Laboratory, and a member of its Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center.
"There is a substantial effort underway to develop drugs aimed at reversing the EMT process in order to halt metastasis, but our findings suggest that this approach may not work," he added. "Instead, we suggest combining chemotherapy with a drug that blocks EMT as the first treatment given to breast cancer patients—and likely others with cancer as well."
The top panel of this image shows breast cancer cells designed to change from red to green when they transition from epithelial to mesenchymal through the EMT. The bottom panel shows breast cancer cells in primary tumors, which progress to …more
"Our study clarified a longstanding question in the field by finding that lung metastases mainly arise from tumor cells that have not undergone EMT," said co-senior author Dr. Ding Cheng Gao, an assistant professor of cell and developmental biology in cardiothoracic surgery and of cell and developmental biology, and a member of the Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine. "However, the EMT tumor cells appear more resistant to chemotherapy, suggesting that the combination of anti-EMT approach and traditional chemotherapy is a better way for combating the deadly metastatic disease."
For their study, the Weill Cornell Medicine investigators and their collaborators at Columbia University, Houston Methodist Research Institute, and Soonchunhyang University in South Korea, developed a new technique called EMT cell lineage tracing to understand the role of EMT in breast cancer. The system, which took three years to develop, tracks individualbreast cancer cells in preclinical models of metastatic breast cancer. The investigators engineered the original breast cancercells to emit a red fluorescence. While EMT occurs, the cancer cells switched from red to green fluorescence.
"As would be expected, we found that within a predominantly epithelial primary tumor, a small portion of tumor cells had undergone EMT," Dr. Mittal said.
But strikingly they also found that cells that metastasized to the lung were red, not green. "This finding was unexpected and suggested that the general notion that EMT is important for generating metastasis was not correct," he said.
To confirm their discovery, the researchers blocked EMT with an inhibitor and found it had no effect on metastasis to the lungs. Then they investigated what happened after the mice received chemotherapy. The chemo treatment efficiently eliminated the glowing red cells—including those in the lungs—but not the green EMT tumor cells. Researchers then observed green metastatic lesions in the lung, which are derived from the EMT cancer cells.
This schematic shows epithelial (red) and mesenchymal (green) cancer cells in primary breast tumors. These tumors metastasize to the lungs to form red nodules, indicating EMT does not generate metastasis (left), but following chemotherapy …more
"This can explain why patients initially respond to chemotherapy, only to find later that the cancer has spread because of chemoresistant EMT tumor cells," Dr. Mittal said.
Researchers then tested a therapy that combines chemotherapy with their experimental EMT blocker and found that no metastasis—and no chemoresistance—occurred in the mice.
"The EMT was a wonderfully compelling explanation for how metastasis could occur, and we certainly did not expect these findings," said first author Kari Fischer, a doctoral candidate in the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. "Hopefully this will redirect efforts toward other explanations for how epithelial cancer cells move. In the meantime, we have made very exciting inroads towards discovering the root of chemoresistance."
Drs. Gao and Mittal are now using their EMT lineage tracing system as a platform to develop and test combination therapies that can be used in patients that will eliminate both epithelial and drug-resistant EMT cancer cells. The translation of their findings could aid the 90 percent of late stage metastatic patients with treatment-refractory disease.
More information: Kari R. Fischer et al. Epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition is not required for lung metastasis but contributes to chemoresistance, Nature (2015). DOI: 10.1038/nature15748
Cancer is hard. As much as you want to be there for a recently-diagnosed friend, it’s difficult to know what to say. And if you’ve recently been diagnosed, you may be at a total loss for how to react.
Truth is, cancer is different for everyone. There’s no universal experience, but there are a few things that all cancer survivors know to be true. Watch along as people who’ve lived through a cancer diagnosis explain what it’s really like and how they got through it.
CANCER DIAGNOSIS: TALK TO SUSAN’S SPECIAL NEEDS WHEN
FIRST DIAGNOSED
What side
effects can I expect from chemotherapy
If I lose my
hair how soon will it fall out and what are my options
Skin care is
extremely important due to changes in your body chemistry
What happens
after my mastectomy/Are there products for me
Cancer is an individual
experience. There is only one way to handle all of the choices presented
to you – Your Way
Susan is an
oncology nurse and breast cancer survivor and author. She was diagnosed in 1992
and elected to have a mastectomy and full course of chemotherapy. She had been
working with cancer patients her entire career. She quickly discovered the
trials experienced with the initial diagnosis and ensuing treatment. She lost her
hair and went into menopause. She was surprised to find how few products were
available. She now has a business helping women undergoing chemotherapy and
radiation treatment. Susan's Special Needs carries a beautiful selection of human hair,
synthetic and blended wigs custom tailored to fit your head in comfort,
mastectomy bras and breast forms, all natural skin care products, fashionable
headwear and scarves.
We
address the emotional issue of appearance with our clients all the time. Our
own individual impression of who we are and how we present ourselves to the
world influences the choices we make to accommodate changes during treatment.
In my experience as an oncology nurse, breast cancer survivor, and what I have
learned in my own practice, there is no right way or wrong way to address the
changes that occur in our appearance. There is only “your” way. Women should be
given options and then choose what is best for them, their comfort, their
lifestyle and budget.
Susan’s Special Needs is conveniently located at 24052
Woodward Avenue, Pleasant Ridge, MI 48069. Please contact us at 248-544-4287 or
visit www.SusansSpecialNeeds.com.
Monday, November 2, 2015
It’s Not Always A Lump: 6 Little-Known Signs That May Indicate Breast Cancer
It’s common knowledge that a lump in the breast may indicate cancer, but breast cancer can also have other lesser-known symptoms. Some of these symptoms may appear before a lump is large enough to detect. Increasing your awareness can help you detect breast cancer in its early stages and have the best chance for effective treatment.
Changes in the skin similar to what Lewis describes can be a symptom of breast cancer. These changes may appear as a thickening of the skin on the breast or other change in the texture of the skin. Enlargement of the pores may also indicate breast cancer and may make the skin look similar in texture to an orange peel. The skin may also turn red or develop a scaly texture.
2. Changes In Appearance Of The Breast Or Nipple
Breast cancer can cause changes in the appearance of the breast that range from dimpling of the skin to inversion of one or both nipples.
If one of your breasts becomes swollen or seems to change in size relative to the other breast, consult a health professional. Another change that could be cause for concern is shrinking of a breast. All of these changes are of greater concern if they affect only one breast, according to the National Breast Cancer Foundation.
4. Nipple Discharge
Discharge from the nipple that is clear, brown or tinged with blood may also indicate breast cancer. If you notice a milky colored discharge, the National Breast Cancer Foundation advises consultation with a doctor, although this type of discharge does not normally indicate cancer.
Although breast pain is not a common symptom of breast cancer, sometimes a cancerous lump in the breast can result in pain. Breast pain that occurs on a sporadic or cyclic basis is less likely to be a breast cancer symptom. If you have breast pain that lasts longer than three weeks, report it to your physician, states WebMD.
6. Lump In The Armpit
A lump or swelling in the armpit can occur for many reasons that don’t necessarily indicate a serious health problem, but breast cancer can also cause this symptom, according to Healthline. Hormonal changes during the menstrual cycle are also a common cause of lumps in the armpit. Performing self-exams within three days of the end of your period can reduce false alarms related to hormonal changes.
All of these symptoms can have benign causes that don’t indicate cancer or another serious health issue, but the only way to know for sure is to talk to your doctor. Although women often seek medical advice quickly upon detection of a lump, they tend to wait longer to see a doctor to investigate other types of symptoms.
