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On the right side of the site, you can access our Dilemma of the Week and read about specific scenarios that may relate to your experiences.  Here you will find a true treatment dilemma that real people faced and the advice for them. Some details have been edited.

By visiting our Forums, you can initiate, participate in or add to the discussions there.  Our Forums allows you to pose questions and solicit advice or information from topic moderators or other participants, both lay people and professionals.

You can also use the Contact Us page to send us your questions and/or cancer treatment related scenarios.  We will do our best to respond to you in a timely manner – and if our resources permit us, we may respond to your scenario in the form of a Dilemma of the Week posting.

We believe that, when faced with cancer, it is important to understand all of your options.  Ideally, a layperson would be able to access all the information that a medical professional can access, but this is not the case. The barriers are arcane professional terminology that impedes your web searching and obscure places where the data that you need is stored or located.  However, CancerTreatmentToday.org aims to offer as much information as possible to our site visitors.  Therefore, we not only provide articles written in such a way that a layperson can generally understand, but we also make available the information written for medical professionals.  The articles for the medical professional are the same that you viewed as a layperson but with the scientific terminology and authoritative references. Having read the lay text you will easily understand the professional version and can follow up on the referenced articles, guidelines and textbooks. We thus offer all of our site visitors – layperson and professional alike – the opportunity to view content that is written for those with an educational background in the medical field.  We hope that this will give a layperson a more in-depth view of the topic they choose to research and result in better self-education.  This should lead a layperson to ask more educated and pointed questions about their care and course of action when faced with cancer and cancer treatment options.  And for the medical professional, it provides an authoritative and up to date summary of topical issues in the field, with recent references.

To directly access articles written in professional medical jargon, click on the link “Professionals” within the Information for You section on any page.  To view layperson versions of the articles, use the “Lay Portal” within the Information for You section.  Within any article, you will have the opportunity to click a link to the layperson or professional version, as the case may be.

We also have recent cancer news on the site, as well as resources, sponsor links and other useful information. Our goal is to provide the right information that you need, when you need it.

Please share your suggestions, criticism and feedback for the site with us here.

It is second only to lung cancer as the most prevalent cause of cancer death in women. Most women are aware of breast cancer, and many, especially those who had seen a loved one suffer from it, fear it. One in eleven women will develop breast cancer over the course of their lives, assuming an average life span of around eighty years. It is not only a disease of older women, many young women are also affected. Because it strikes mostly, though not exclusively, women, breast cancer finds itself at the intersection of important and basic questions that preoccupy our society, issues of fairness, equitable distribution of care, gender discrimination and sexuality. As a result, it attracts a larger share of public attention, advocacy, resources and research funding than most other cancers. For this reason, it is also the cancer in which new paradigms and treatment approaches have traditionally been tested and refined before other cancers. It is for this reason, for example, that we learned in breast cancer how to combine chemotherapy, surgery and radiation, how to integrate medical, psychosocial and societal issues in cancer care, how to develop new drugs and how to combine them. The first non-chemotherapy biological ever used in cancer, Herceptin, was used for breast cancer. We learned many approaches and concepts from clinical trials in breast cancer. It is in the course of caring for this disease that many new paradigms in health care delivery were tried and evaluated, from the how to use facilitators to improve access to medical care for poor women, to how to deal with the issues of sexuality and survivorship after cancer cure.

In Cancer Treatment Today you will find short up-to-date discussions of diagnostic and treatment issues in Breast Cancer, in both Lay and Professional versions. We hope that you find them helpful and informative.

Breast Cancer Articles and Information

Read more about Breast Cancer, symptoms related to Breast Cancer and the most up to date information about Breast Cancer research.

An average American has a 5% chance of developing colon cancer during his or her lifetime. During the past several decades, colon cancers have become more frequent higher up in the colon, making colonoscopy that can inspect farther in, more important for screening and diagnosis. Right-sided colon cancer rarely produces changes in bowel habits but are more likely to be the source of chronic occult bleeding that can lead to symptoms consistent with iron deficiency anemia. For this reason, the first line of defense is screening with occult stool testing.

It is sometimes called colorectal cancer because colon cancer and rectal cancers are similar in how they behave and in how they are treated. Colon cancer is a field in which a great deal of progress has recently been made. There have been major advances in screening for colon cancer, with new types of colonoscopy, capsule endoscopy, and improvement in other imaging techniques. Surgery for colon cancer has improved and it is now even possible to perform it laparoscopically. Radiation does not have much overall in treating colon cancer, but it is in integral part of treatment for rectal cancer. On the other hand, chemotherapy for both colon cancer and rectal cancer employs similar drugs. Major advances in this area include the drugs oxaliplatin, irinotecan, cetuximab, panitimumab and Avastin. Xeloda has been used for colon cancer for a long time. Most recently, the drug Zaltrapp was approved for second line therapy of colon cancer.

With these advances, people with colon cancer are living longer and have a better quality of life. We are at the cusp of an era in which colon cancer will become a chronic disease, even when it had spread, and a much more curable illness if it had not spread.

Colon Cancer Articles and Information

Read more about Colon Cancer, symptoms related to Colon Cancer and the most up to date information about Colon Cancer research.

It is related to smoking. Although smoking rates have been declining since the Surgeon General’s report of 1964, the effect on lung cancer is delayed by several decades. This means that it is still the deadliest cancer, and yet, the amount of research funding, support and public advocacy that goes into lung cancer is dwarfed by what breast or prostate cancer receive. Some speculate that as a cancer predominantly of smokers, a group that our society stigmatizes and disregards, lung cancer is unpopular and ignored.

Still, lung cancer treatment has significantly changed from a time just a decade ago, when treatments were few and disfiguring and metastatic lung cancer was viewed as a certain death sentence. Screening and prophylaxis trials taught us a great deal about how to prevent this disease and how to diagnose it in earlier stages, in which treatment has a higher chance of cure and prolongation of life. Smoking cessation has become a priority in public discourse, reducing new lung cancer rates (unfortunately, it takes decades to see the full benefit of stopping smoking). Understanding how to sequence chemotherapy, surgery and radiation increased cure rates in stages II and III, and the introduction of new drugs, such as Alimta, Avastin, Tarceva and most recently Xalkori, has brought oncologists to the point where even metastatic lung cancer may soon become a chronic disease. The revolution in cancer care has not bypassed this field, and survival rates have more than doubled in the past decade. Personalized medicine and the ongoing growth of biological therapies carry a promise, nay, a certainty that lung cancer too, like other previously deadly cancer types, can become a treatable and curable illness even in later stages.

Lung Cancer Articles and Information

Read more about Lung Cancer, symptoms related to Lung Cancer and the most up to date information about Lung Cancer research.

Like breast cancer, it is gender specific, strikes organs of intimacy and procreation, is hormonally sensitive, and affects large numbers of people in both early and late stages. Like it, screening methods are available. Many of the issues that preoccupy breast cancer advocates, such as how to screen and prevent, how to diagnose earlier and preserve organs, and how to deal with the issues of survivorship and sexuality, also preoccupy advocates for prostate cancer.

This is a disease traditionally dogged by dispute. Part of the problem is that prostate cancer is treated by three different types of medical specialists: urologists, radiation oncologists and medical oncologists. Each of these specialties advocates the type of treatment that it administers and with which it is familiar. Urologists recommend prostatectomy for early prostate cancer, whereas radiation specialists offer various kinds of radiotherapy and oncologists tend to favor hormonal treatments. Fortunately, some of these issues are approaching resolution as more studies are completed and more high quality information becomes available. The place of PSA is prostate cancer screening, which treatment is better for early prostate cancer, and how to sequence treatments for metastatic prostate cancer are issues that have been discussed for decades. New studies and concepts are beginning to bring clarity to these issues, although controversies are still ongoing. Several new imaging modalities are making staging and diagnosis more accurate and a better basis for treatment selection. As in other cancer types, personalized medicine is visible on the horizon and it will transform how prostate cancer is approached.

Several new drugs have recently been approved for prostate cancer: Zytiga, Provenge, Jevtana, Xtandi, and others are on the way to being FDA approved. This will transform the face of this disease, for the better. More information on prostate cancer and developments in treatment is available on this site.

Prostate Cancer Articles and Information

Read more about Prostate Cancer, symptoms related to Prostate Cancer and the most up to date information about Prostate Cancer research.

Advancement of science enables doctors to obtain a variety of markers in cancer tissues from a biopsy or after surgery of a particular cancer. Some of these markers are purely prognostic but some are targets for drugs that are already approved, or are being researched, although they may not be approved for this particular cancer. In other words, these drugs are already being used for the same targets in other cancer types. The ability to identify these markers enables doctors to provide Personalized Medicine, or a different personalized approach to each cancer. In the past, drugs were approved for specific cancers diagnoses, for example, for prostate cancer or for breast cancer and the like. With Personalized Medicine approach it is possible to use drugs based on their targets, even though the cancer that has the target is not the one for which studies of effectiveness of that particular drug have been conducted. A drug may have been approved for lymphoma but the target may be present in a pancreatic cancer, for example. This approach represents the cutting edge of diagnostic science, and it is referred to as, “Personalized Medicine”. It faces Cancer Medicine with a paradigm shift that it us finding difficult to assimilate, for it is logistically impossible and unaffordable to demonstrate effectiveness of a drug for a target in every cancer in which this target may be identified. It is entirely possible that a target or a mutation drives a malignancy of one type, but in another cancer it is merely a bystander. Without a demonstration of effectiveness, however, one cannot be sure that this target will truly prove to be the drivingone for this particular cancer, or that a Personalized Medicine therapy directed against it will really prove to be effective. Government and insurers are balking at paying for Personalized Medicine, seeing it as an expensive therapy that is based on a concept, and not solid research. The idea behind Personalized Medicine, that one can individualize cancer therapy based on specific tumor characteristics is attractive but needs to be proven before being widely adapted. As of now, there is little evidence to support Personalized Medicine beyond anecdotal reports and no guidelines or professional bodies recommending it. The potential of Personalized Medicine to transform cancer treatment, however, is immense.

Personalized medicine approach promises to supplant the current treatment paradigm in oncology. Traditionally and now, treatment focus was based on the particular cancer type and treatments were selected on how they did in large phase III trials. Drugs that did not show activity or had never been tested for a particular cancer type could not be used for that type with any kind of scientific credibility. More recently, an approach is taking shape that is based on the individual cancer in an individual patient. Tumor characteristics are studied with chemosenstitivity tests and one of a variety of genetic profiling tests that are now available, of which several are available. Specific mutations can be uncovered and then targeted with drugs approved for other cancer types that are targeted to this specific mutation or antigen. Unfortunately, the new paradigm does not “fit” well with the existing approaches and methods for weighing and evaluating evidence supporting cancer treatments, and new approaches to do so have not yet been developed.

Goldberger JJ, Buxton AE.. Personalized medicine vs guideline-based medicine.
JAMA. 2013 Jun 26;309(24):2559-60.

1. Teng K, Eng C, Hess CA et al. Building an innovative model for personalized healthcare. Clev. Clin. J. Med.79(Suppl. 1), S1–S9 (2012).

Acharya et al. (2008), Gene Expression Signatures, clinicopathological features, and individualized therapy in breast cancer, JAMA 299: 1574.
Sadee W, Dai Z. (2005), Pharmacogenetics/genomics and personalized medicine, Hum Mol Genet. 2005 October 15;14 Spec No. 2:R207-14.
Steven H. Y. Wong (2006), Pharmacogenomics and Proteomics: Enabling the Practice of Personalized Medicine, American Association for Clinical Chemistry, ISBN 1-59425-046-4
Qing Yan (2008), Pharmacogenomics in Drug Discovery and Development, Humana Press, 2008, ISBN 1-58829-887-6.
Willard, H.W., and Ginsburg, G.S., (eds), (2009), Genomic and Personalized Medicine, Academic Press, 2009, ISBN 0-12-369420-5.
Haile, Lisa A. (2008), Making Personalized Medicine a Reality, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News Vol. 28, No. 1.

Medicine for the treatment of cancer is evolving to account for breakthroughs in the understanding of a variety of markers in cancer tissue.  This is true of all cancers, allowing doctors to personalize the care and the medicine a patient receives which increases the changes that a person will live longer with the disease and/or be cured.

Read articles and information about many cancers including brain cancer, colon cancer, liver cancer and skin cancer.

Here you will also find valuable information about treatment therapies such as radiation, immunotherapy, and surgery.

Read the Professional version here.

Percutaneous radiofrequency coagulation or ablation of the nidus the osteoma is performed by using an electrode placed in the lesion, coupled with a radiofrequency generator that produces local tissue destruction by converting radiofrequency into heat. Complete or nearly complete relief of pain often occurs within 3 days. Patients are sent home on same day of surgery, and they have no limitations in weight bearing, though aggressive athletics are restricted for 2-3 months. Patients may then return to normal activities immediately or within 24-48 hours after surgery. For this reason, it is currently the favored procedure for osteoblastic osteoma. It works fast; Pain resolves quickly, and limping resolves within 24 hours. Furthermore, this procedure requires only a small osseous access to allow insertion of the electrode; therefore, no substantial structural weakening of the bone occurs. Primary cure rates are 83-94%. Cure with a second ablation procedure is approximately 100% and recurrence is very rare.

Read the Professional version here.

Read the Professional version here.