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Saturday, August 08, 2009

Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma research article

Just saw this article again, published April 1, 2009, and thought you might want to know about it:
Volker, H; Scheich, M; Berndt, A; et al. Expression of p-AKT characterizes adenoid cystic carcinomas of head and neck with a higher risk for tumor relapse. Diagnostic Pathology 2009, 4:18 http://www.diagnosticpathology.org/content/4/1/18 .
This is an open access journal, so you can read the full text. The scientists in Wurzburg, Germany studied tumor specimens from 29 patients to do this research. I like this understated sentence in the Background section: "The identification of tumors with a higher relapse risk seems to be interesting." Ya think?! Guess that is the 'distancing language' of the scientists, who must find it hard to work on such tough stuff day after day.
It would be nice to be able to know if my tumor was one that tested high for relapse, local or distant, but how useful is the knowledge? Not sure what they would do with that knowledge at this time, since it can take years for the cancer to grow back locally or in some distant region.
The collection of references on this article could be additional sources of reading for you or your health professional. This review article might be a good place to start for your family physician if they are not up on treatment of salivary gland cancers, for example: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18402531. Remember that you can order full-text articles for a fee through most libraries listed at this directory in MedlinePlus: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/libraries.html

1 comment:

Jeanne said...

Teri--I'm like you. I would want to know, "Yeah, but what does this mean for ME?"

Not that it's not interesting in its own right ...

 
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