What Is The Latest Mesothelioma Disease Information?

One of the most aggressive cancers of the last century is also the one least known about in the public eye. Mesothelioma disease information was the least talked about, especially when it came to public news about dangers of asbestos. Strides towards ending this cancer were accomplished when the substance that causes it, asbestos, was removed, by law, from many of the same places that workers were exposed to it, like factories and shipyards, and its use in construction became outlawed. It was not until a number of workers in the mines where it was cultivated came down with the cancer than more information was finally released to the public.

What Is Mesothelioma?

Now that the world has learned more Mesothelioma disease information, some basic facts have become known about this very aggressive form of cancer. It is chiefly caused by exposure to asbestos, a naturally occurring mineral mined throughout the Southwest, and the victims most likely to develop it were construction workers, miners, and industrial workers that created the insulation used in construction and other industries.

Mesothelioma disease information also revealed that this cancer is primarily found in the lining of the lungs, heart and abdomen. Pleural Mesothelioma, where the asbestos fibers have lodged themselves within the very liner that allows the lungs their free movement during breathing, is the most common. Pericardial Mesothelioma is more rare, when asbestos fibers have found their way into the pericardium, the membrane around the heart. Peritoneal Mesothelioma, is also rare, and occurs when the asbestos finds its way to the stomach lining.

Symptoms And Treatment

The symptoms associated with Pleural Mesothelioma, the most common form according to Mesothelioma disease information, begins with shortness of breath, an extraordinary buildup of fluid within the lungs, and chronic hoarseness. By the time this cancer is diagnosed, the victim is also experiencing chronic coughing, with blood, muscle weakness and chest pain. Final stages include sensory loss, paralysis and swelling in the face and arms. All too often companies claimed that their workers were affected by it because they also smoked, causing the fibers to be inhaled in that manner, and ineligible for compensation through attorneys and law firms.

The treatment options available for this common form, according to Mesothelioma disease information, will require several surgeries to complete. The first surgery often performed by doctors at clinics and treatment centers is a pleurectomy decortication, removing part of the lung lining in order to remove any tumors. If the tumors continue to appear, a second surgery, a extrapleural pneumonectomy, removing up to one lung, in order to get all of the tumors out of the body.

Laws And Litigation

According to Mesothelioma disease information, because the symptoms are so similar to a host of other diseases, the fact that it is cancer is often found too late for effective treatment. This has led to many lawsuits filed by lawyers against the companies responsible, and to many states creating laws to limit litigation and compensation as a result.

'Panoramic View' of Lung Cancer Gained From Latest Trials

Results from three recent genome-sequencing trials have provided a revolutionary insight into the deadly disease.

Lung cancer is responsible for more deaths than any other form of the disease. Fewer than 20% of the 1.6 million cases diagnosed across the globe every year are still alive five years later.

The trend in new studies focuses on personalised treatment. Genome-sequencing trials are used to match the best possible treatment to the specific genetic make up of a patient's tumours.

In the latest trials, researchers analysed tumour tissue samples from 183 patients suffering from lung adenocarcinomas, 178 suffering from lung squamous cell carcinomas and drilled-down studies of 17 tumours from smokers and non-smokers.

Author of two of the studies, Ramaswamy Govindan from the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, said:

"For the first time, instead of looking through a keyhole we are getting a penthouse panoramic view,"

He added that previous studies had already looked more closely at personalised treatment but focused on a small number of genes. In contrast, the recent studies gleaned data across an entire genome.

Professor Govindan, who specialises in Medical Oncology believes that these kinds of "cataloguing studies" will revolutionise the way lung cancer clinical trials are designed. Instead of huge, expensive trials that feature a diverse collection of mutations, smaller studies will laser-down into patients' tumours according to their specific mutation. Medical experts are expecting this tailored therapy to be more beneficial for patients suffering from cancer.

The advances of such studies are clear - generic treatments tend to have a far greater number of side-effects as they are simply designed to kill any rapidly dividing cells rather than only attacking the ones spreading the disease. Furthermore, data from the targeted studies not only forms the basis of new treatments, they can cast light on those ones already on the market.

Drugs that treat adenocarcinoma, the strain behind 40 per cent of lung cancer cases, have already been approved. However, there are no approved drugs for treating another very common form of cancer, squamous cell carcinoma. Lung cancer clinical trials based on data from the recent targeted studies could be used to approve existing marketed drugs for the treatment of squamous cell carcinoma according to Matthew Meyerson, a researcher from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts who also worked on the trials:

"The data that are really going to be informative is when you combine genomic data with outcomes of targeted therapies."

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