Beauty and Skin Care » melanoma

Skin Care :Sunburn Relief & Skin Care Tips : Homemade Skin Care Product Recipe

admin — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:33:37 +0000

Learn how to make a homemade sun protection skin care product with expert skin care tips in this free beauty and sun protection video clip. Expert: Dr. Susan Jewell Bio: Dr. Susan Jewell is a British born educated bilingual Asian with a British accent and can speak Cantonese. Filmmaker:

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Article Content:
Learn how to make a homemade sun protection skin care product with expert skin care tips in this free beauty and sun protection video clip.

Expert: Dr. Susan Jewell
Bio: Dr. Susan Jewell is a British born educated bilingual Asian with a British accent and can speak Cantonese.
Filmmaker: Nili Nathan

Duration : 0:2:47

Technorati Tags: burn, cancer, care, melanoma, natural, organic, products, signs, skin, sun, tip, tips, treatment

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Skin Care and Beauty :Bristol drug extends survival in deadly skin cancer

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 07:27:31 +0000

Bristol-Myers Squibb Co’s experimental skin cancer drug ipilimumab added an average of four months to the lives of patients with advanced melanoma, U.S. researchers said on Saturday, representing a major advance in a disease littered with drug failures.
Melanoma is one of the

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Bristol-Myers Squibb Co’s experimental skin cancer drug ipilimumab added an average of four months to the lives of patients with advanced melanoma, U.S. researchers said on Saturday, representing a major advance in a disease littered with drug failures.

Melanoma is one of the deadliest cancers and can quickly spread from the skin to internal organs, such as the brain.

“Once it metastasizes, the average survival is six to nine months and we really had no effective treatments for patients who have had prior treatment for melanoma,” said Dr. Steven O’Day, one of the study’s lead investigators.

In the 676-patient study, patients who got the drug survived for an average of 10 months, compared with just over six months if they just got a vaccine treatment called gp100, investigators found.

The four-month difference represented a 67 percent increase in survival, O’Day told reporters at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago.

For some patients, the benefit was lasting, with more than 20 percent of those who took the drug still alive after two years, and some still alive even four years after treatment.

“I think this a breakthrough for the field of metastatic melanoma that has had a lot of negative Phase 3 trials in the last decade. It’s impacting survival, which is the gold standard in cancer clinical trials,” O’Day, director of the melanoma program at the Angeles Clinic and Research Institute in Santa Monica, California, said in a telephone interview.

Ipilimumab helps to activate the immune system to fight the cancer. Doctors give it to patients in a 90-minute infusion every three weeks for a total of four doses.

All patients in the trial had previous treatment for melanoma before getting either an experimental cancer vaccine called GP-100, ipilimumab, or a combination of the two.

Both groups that got the Bristol drug had a statistically significant improvement in overall survival compared with those who just got the vaccine, researchers said.

In the two ipilimumab arms, the drug cut the risk of death from melanoma by 32 percent to 34 percent compared with the vaccine alone.

“If you look at one-year and two-year survival, there was a near doubling of benefit with ipilimumab,” O’Day said.

One-year survival was seen in 25 percent of the vaccine patients, compared with 44 percent on the combination and 46 percent for ipilimumab alone.

After two years, 14 percent of vaccine patients were alive versus 22 percent and 24 percent in the Bristol drug arms.

In the 20 percent to 30 percent of patients for whom the drug really works, survival “tends to be months and years, not weeks and months like chemotherapy,” O’Day said.

HOPES FOR SPEEDY APPROVAL

He said a genetic biomarker test was needed to determine just which patients were most likely to benefit from the drug.

Since the drug enlists the help of the immune system, it does have some serious side effects.

About two-thirds of patients on ipilimumab had some form of immune-related side effects compared with one-third on vaccine, researchers said.

Most were mild and completely reversible, but about 10 to 14 percent of patients had more severe side effects, such as colitis, that required treatment with steroids or immunosuppressive drugs, O’Day explained.

Some 2 percent to 3 percent of patients on ipilimumab died from the treatment because of colon perforation or other severe immune system side effects.

Doctors would have to closely monitor patient reaction, O’Day said, but he added the side effects could be managed.

O’Day believes ipilimumab may also work in other types of cancer.

Leerink Swann analyst Seamus Fernandez forecasts ipilimumab sales of 5 million in 2016 with an approval for metastatic melanoma.

But some doctors worry that patients will start asking for the drug and will not be able to get it.

“This is not an FDA-approved drug,” said Dr. Lynn Schuchter, a skin cancer specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study.

“Patients are going to have a lot of hope and want this drug and it’s not going to be on their doctors’ shelves.”

She said it may be possible for patients to get the drug through melanoma centers of excellence either in a clinical trial or through a so-called compassionate use protocol.

O’Day is counting on a speedy approval.

“We’re hopeful that this (data) is the beginning of what will be a rapid regulatory processing to try to get this drug on the market and access to more patients with melanoma,” O’Day said.

(Reporting by Bill Berkrot and Julie Steenhuysen; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Technorati Tags: cancer, ipilimumab, melanoma, skin cancer, skin cancer drug

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Beauty and Skin Care :FDA debates tougher cancer warning on tanning beds

admin — Mon, 31 May 2010 07:15:06 +0000

Just as millions head to tanning beds to prepare for spring break, the Food and Drug Administration will be debating how to toughen warnings that those sunlamps pose a cancer risk.
Yes, sunburns are particularly dangerous. But there’s increasing scientific consensus that there’s

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Just as millions head to tanning beds to prepare for spring break, the Food and Drug Administration will be debating how to toughen warnings that those sunlamps pose a cancer risk.

Yes, sunburns are particularly dangerous. But there’s increasing scientific consensus that there’s no such thing as a safe tan, either.

This is a message that Katie Donnar, 18, dismissed until a year ago when, preparing for the Miss Indiana pageant, she discovered a growth on her leg — an early-stage melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer.

She can’t prove tanning beds are to blame, but started using them as a sixth-grade cheerleader, says she stepped under the bulbs about every other day during parts of high school, and at one point even owned one. No more.

“It seemed somewhat of a myth that I was putting myself at risk,” says Donnar, of Bruceville, Ind., who found the melanoma before it spread.

“The warning label was so small, nothing to make me stop and think, ‘This is real,’ ” she said of the tanning bed.

The World Health Organization’s cancer division last summer listed tanning beds as definitive cancer-causers, right alongside the ultraviolet radiation that both they and the sun emit. They’d long been considered “probable” carcinogens, but what tipped the scales: An analysis of numerous studies that concluded the risk of melanoma jumps by 75 percent in people who used tanning beds in their teens and 20s.

Next comes the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has long regulated tanning beds as “Class I devices,” a category of low-risk medical devices that includes bandages. Tanning beds do bear some warnings about the cancer link, but the FDA recently decided those labels aren’t visible enough to consumers and don’t fully convey the risk, especially to young people.

So in March, the FDA’s scientific advisers open a public hearing to explore stricter tanning bed regulation, both stiffer warnings and reclassifying them to allow other steps.

“We don’t recommend using them at all, but we know people do use them so we want to make them as low-risk as possible,” says FDA UV radiation specialist Sharon Miller.

The Indoor Tanning Association, already fighting pending legislation that would tax tanning salons to help pay for Congress’ health care overhaul, argues there’s no new science to justify increased FDA regulation. Any risk is to people who overdo it, says ITA President Dan Humiston, arguing that’s easier to do in the sun.

The industry is open to some change in warning labels, Humiston says, to ensure customers “understand the whole process, so there’s no chance they could be overexposed, no chance they could get a sunburn.”

But the FDA also says some people go too often, using tanning beds three times a week, for example, when its research shows once a week would provide visually the same tan.

The tanning bed debate isn’t an excuse to roast in the sun instead. Nor is melanoma the only risk. Also linked to UV exposure are basal and squamous cell carcinomas, which affect more than 1 million Americans a year. They’re usually easily removed but the American Cancer Society counts 2,000 annual deaths. Melanoma is more lethal: Nearly 69,000 U.S. cases were diagnosed last year, and about 8,650 people died.

Fair-skinned people who don’t tan easily are at highest risk. Melanoma is particularly linked to sunburns at a young age, and while it usually strikes in the 40s and 50s, doctors are seeing ever-younger cases like Donnar.

A good tan provides the equivalent of a sunscreen rated just SPF-4, and even good tanners can get melanoma, says Dr. Margaret Tucker of the National Cancer Institute. Their risk, like everybody’s, increases with increasing UV exposure.

Why? “If there was enough (UV) to give you a tan, it had to have triggered DNA damage,” says Dr. David Fisher of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a spokesman for the Skin Cancer Foundation.

Here’s how: A protein called p53 is activated by genetic damage from UV rays. Its main job is to mend such damage, but it also sets off a chain reaction — triggering production of a hormone that filters down to pigment-producing cells called melanocytes and orders them to color the skin’s surface, Fisher explains.

In other words, “the very pathway for tanning is directly biochemically linked to the same pathway of carcinogenesis,” says Fisher.

He acknowledges it’s impossible to predict if a drop in indoor tanning might translate into less cancer because everyone gets sun.

“We don’t want people to become indoor cave-dwellers,” says NCI’s Tucker.

So be out in the early morning and late afternoon, when those UV rays penetrate less, and use sunscreen. In Indiana, that’s Donnar’s new lifestyle, plus some spray-on tanners for pageants.

“My friends call me ’snow princess’ now but I feel comfortable in my own skin.”

Technorati Tags: melanoma, Skin Care, tanning beds and cancer

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