malignant pleural mesothelioma

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    Occupational Risks of Carbon Nanotubes Include Mesothelioma

    ByAlex Strauss

    Are carbon nanotubes the next asbestos? A new report in Occupational Medicine and Health Affairs suggests that the dangers of working with these tiny particles can include lung cancer and deadly malignant pleural mesothelioma – the same diseases caused by exposure to asbestos. Carbon nanotubes are tubular cylinders of carbon atoms. These tiny manmade particles have been found to have some extraordinary properties – including strength, elasticity and conductivity –  that are useful in making products ranging from baseball bats to electronics and optical lenses. Like asbestos, carbon nanotubes are also resistant to corrosion. As a result, they’re being used with increasing frequency, which means that more workers in these fields are likely to be exposed to them. In a…

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    Enzyme May Help Doctors Determine Mesothelioma Prognosis

    ByAlex Strauss

    Cancer researchers in New York say they have found a new way to help determine prognosis for people with malignant pleural mesothelioma. In a report in the Annals of Surgical Oncology, a team of doctors from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center say patients whose cancer cells tested positive for an enzyme called CD10 had more aggressive mesothelioma and shorter survival times. Right now, stage (a measure of how far cancer has spread in the body) and type are the primary prognostic factors for mesothelioma. People with more advanced cancer or non-epithelioid mesothelioma tend to have poorer outcomes than people with epithelioid or early-stage mesothelioma. By offering another reliable prognostic factor, the new study suggests that CD10 can help make the process more effective, which may improve…

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    BAP1 Mutation Unlikely to Trigger Sporadic Mesothelioma

    ByAlex Strauss

    But researchers at the Clinic of Oncology at the University Hospital of Zurich and University Hospitals in Leuven, Belgium say they have evidence to show that BAP1 mutations account for only a tiny percentage of sporadic mesothelioma cases. Mesothelioma is normally associated with exposure to asbestos dust and previous studies have found that people with the BAP1 mutation are more susceptible to cancer-causing effects of asbestos. Twenty-three percent of mesothelioma tumor specimens have been found to have a mutated BAP1 gene. But some cases of mesothelioma appear to arise “sporadically”, with no history of asbestos exposure.  Researchers around the world have long been trying to pinpoint the reasons these sporadic mesothelioma cases develop in an effort to prevent and/or treat…

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    Chemotherapy May be Underutilized for Mesothelioma

    ByAlex Strauss

    Doctors from the Asbestos Diseases Research Institute and Sydney Medical School reached their conclusions by comparing data on mesothelioma patients and their tumor characteristics with evidence-based mesothelioma treatment guidelines. They used special “decision analysis software” to calculate what they say is the optimal utilization rate for chemotherapy in mesothelioma. “Chemotherapy is recommended at least once during the disease trajectory in 65% of malignant pleural mesothelioma patients,” writes author Stephen Chuan-Hao Kao. According to Dr. Kao and his colleagues, that optimal rate is relatively close to what is being done for mesothelioma patients in Canada where 61% of patients got chemotherapy between 2003 and 2005 and in Australia where the rate was 54% between 2007 and 2009. Unfortunately, the Australian study…

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    Fine Needle Biopsy: An Easier Way to Diagnose Mesothelioma?

    ByAlex Strauss

    IExamining the tissue from a suspected tumor under a microscope is currently the only way to definitively diagnose suspected mesothelioma. But doctors at the University of Catania say cutting-needle biopsy, the pleural biopsy technique used by most surgeons, may be unnecessarily painful for patients. In their response to a recent published article on the subject in the journal Chest, Dr. Marco Sperandeo and colleagues present the case for what they say is a less traumatic type of biopsy – thoracic ultrasound-guided fine needle aspiration. According to the Italian researchers,  “These tools, quite neglected, are complementary to CT imaging in patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) or lung cancer (LC), are less traumatic, and are equally or more successful, with minimal…

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    Mesothelioma Subtype Predicts Poor Survival Odds

    ByAlex Strauss

    Histological subtyping, which involves classifying mesothelioma types by certain microscopic features, plays a crucial role in diagnosis, treatment, and determining life expectancy in malignant pleural mesothelioma. The three major subtypes of pleural mesothelioma are epithelioid, sarcomatoid, and biphasic. While all three types carry a poor prognosis, epithelioid mesothelioma, which accounts for 50 to 70 percent of cases, usually responds better to treatment than the other two types. But a new published study suggests that that is not always the case. Doctors at the University of Zagreb School of Medicine in Croatia say there is a subtype of epithelioid mesothelioma that carries as poor a prognosis as the sarcomatoid and biphasic types. To reach that conclusion, the team analyzed biopsy specimens and…

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    Blood Pressure Drug May Offer New Hope for a Mesothelioma Cure

    ByAlex Strauss

    Japanese researchers say a drug used to treat high blood pressure may finally present an effective way to combat this deadly cancer. The drug is call naftopidil. It is marketed in the U.S. under the brand name Flivas and is known as an alpha blocker or an alpha-adrenergic antagonist. In addition to high blood pressure, naftopidil is used to treat certain prostate conditions and Raynaud’s disease. There is increasing evidence that it may also have antitumor properties on a variety of cancer types, including prostate cancer. Respiratory medicine researchers at Hyogo College of Medicine in Nishinomiya, Japan have been studying the effects of naftopidil on mesothelioma for several years. In their most recent study, they tested naftopidil on mesothelioma cells…

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    Longer Mesothelioma Survival Not Always Linked to Specific Treatments

    ByAlex Strauss

    A new study conducted in Australia contains some good news and some bad news for people with malignant pleural mesothelioma and their loved ones. The findings indicate that it is possible to survive longer with pleural mesothelioma, but survival may not have as much to do with specific treatments as scientists have thought. The study focused on 910 patients from New South Wales, Australia, an area with a rich history of asbestos mining. Patients were all registered with the New South Wales Dust Diseases board between 2002 and 2009. Researchers from the Asbestos Diseases Research Institute and Sydney Medical School used the database to compile a list of prognostic factors that appear to impact mesothelioma survival. Ninety percent of study…

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    Light-based Diagnostic Tool May Find Early Mesothelioma

    ByAlex Strauss

    Cancer researchers in Japan say technology that uses fluorescent light to detect cancer cells could be used to help find early evidence of malignant pleural mesothelioma. The technology is based on a phenomenon called autofluorescence, explained by the Japanese research team as “the spontaneous emission of light that occurs when mitochondria, lysosomes, and other intracellular organelles absorb light”. Normal cells produce green autofluorescence in response to a certain type of blue light. But in mesothelioma and other cancer cells, the green autofluorescence is reduced and the light emitted shifts to a red-violet. Doctors at the Department of Respiratory Center at Asahikawa Medical University in Hokkaido used this photodynamic diagnostic system to find tiny clusters of mesothelioma cells on the surface…

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    Cholesterol Drugs Ineffective Against Mesothelioma

    ByAlex Strauss

    A new study from the University of Western Australia has dealt a blow to the idea that the anti-cancer properties of statin drugs could help fight malignant pleural mesothelioma. Statins are a group of drugs that are typically used to lower high cholesterol and treat heart disease by blocking a substance the body needs to make cholesterol. Statins have been found to induce apoptosis (programmed cell death) in mesothelioma cells and epidemiological evidence has suggested that people on statins have a lower incidence of cancer. Based on these facts, researchers at Australia’s National Center for Asbestos Related Diseases hypothesized that statin drugs might be used to slow the progression of mesothelioma in patients who have it, and possibly even prevent mesothelioma development…