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NEWS:
Immunotherapy Side Effects: What to know
If you’ve researched cancer treatment options, you’ve probably heard of immunotherapy, which trains the immune system to attack cancer, rather than attacking the cancer directly. You also might've heard that immunotherapy causes fewer side effects than traditional chemotherapy.
But that’s not always the case.
More than 60% of patients who receive some form of immunotherapy will also develop side effects. Some of those will be severe enough to interrupt or halt their cancer treatments.
Fortunately, doctors continue to learn how to recognize and better manage these side effects, so that more patients can benefit from this highly effective form of therapy. Here’s what patients need to know.
Fatigue, inflammation top common side effects
Examples of immune checkpoint drugs include:
pembrolizumab (Keytruda)
nivolumab (Opdivo)
atezolizumab (Tecentriq)
ipilimumab (Yervoy)
avelumab (Baven
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Lidocaine May Be Able to Kill Certain Cancer Cells by Activating Bitter Taste Receptors
Lidocaine—often used as numbing agent for outpatient medical procedures—activates certain bitter taste receptors through two unique mechanisms that result in cancer cell death, according to researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Their findings, published today in Cell Reports, pave the way for a clinical trial to test the addition of lidocaine to the standard of care therapy for patients with head and neck cancers. The local anesthetic drug has long been suggested to have beneficial effects in cancer patients, but it wasn’t known how or why.
The preclinical study was led by Robert Lee, PhD, and Ryan Carey, MD, both assistant professors of Otorhinolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery, and Zoey Miller, a Pharmacology graduate student at Penn and member of Lee’s lab. The team found that lidocaine activates the bitter taste receptor T2R14, which is
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Attention Deficit Disorder May Increase Dementia Risk
Adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, are nearly three times more likely than their peers without attention problems to develop dementia in old age, according to a new report. But adults with ADHD who are taking psychostimulant medications to treat their attention deficits are not at increased risk of dementia, the study found.
The findings raise intriguing questions about the connections between ADHD and the risk of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, and whether drugs or lifestyle modifications to treat attention problems can affect the risk of developing dementia.
For the study, published in JAMA Network Open, researchers looked at 109,218 older men and women living in Israel. They were in their 50s or 60s at the start of the study period, in 2003. None had Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia when the study began.
The researchers followe
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Workplace Ostracism Is Clearly Associated With Healthcare Workers’ Job Satisfaction, Stress, And Perceived Health
Workplace ostracism refers to someone being excluded from social interaction in the workplace without any explanation. Published in Journal of Advanced Nursing, a recent study by the University of Eastern Finland shows that workplace ostracism weakened healthcare workers’ job satisfaction and perceived health, and increased stress. The study also explored the mediating effects of loneliness and self-esteem on the aforementioned factors. A key observation was that loneliness did not weaken job satisfaction as much as ostracism alone did.
“This finding speaks volumes of the crushing effects of workplace ostracism. Experienced loneliness weakens job satisfaction as such but, according to our study, ostracism is far worse,” says the lead author, Doctoral Researcher Sirpa Manninen of the University of Eastern Finland.
Previous studies on workplace ostracism in the healthcare sector have not
