Hello all,

I was paging through my alumni magazine and a brief article about mucositis caught my eye. It seems that Dr. Cohen at the University of Chicago (my brother's oncologist) is working with scientists at the Argonne National Lab to try to predict which patients might have mucositis. They are in the midst of a two-year trial.

The full article can be accessed here: http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0834/investigations/next_generation.shtml

Hi - it sounds like an interesting article, but I get the infamous "page not found error"... would you mind resending the link.
THANKS!

You just need to delete the period at the end of the link, which got caught in the copied URL.

Michelle -- The period at the end of the link should not be there. When you get the "page not found" message, just delete the period after shmtl in the address field, hit the Enter key and the article will appear.
I see Jeff took care of that explanation.

Alternatively, click here.

-- Leslie

There are a variety of wound healing drugs and treatments in clinical trials. At the present time without them, this is interesting, but I don't see the application. A patient that is going to have severe mucocitis (I did, morphine level pain) isn't going to stop treatments that might save their lives in order to avoid mucocitis sores. They are going to tough it out, because the alternative is that the cancer will continue to gain ground if they do not. This is only relevant as a technology when there is something that is available that will counteract the development of mucocitis or reduce its impact. Knowing who is going to have the worst cases of it does not help right now.

[quote=Brian Hill] Knowing who is going to have the worst cases of it does not help right now. [/quote]

Other than being able to prepare the patient and/or the staff for it. It seemed to me that the doc and staff were in a mode of damage control with my mucoscitis sores instead of being proactive like they were on everything else.

Kevin

Kevin, I agree with you. I am certainly not suggesting that someone not have treatment because of mucositis. I do think that knowing you might be more likely to have this effect would be helpful in terms of treatment path.

On a great side note - Joe had a check-up at U of C yesterday. They still can't do a biopsy because of all his tongue and mouth sores, but he is doing well and has started to regain some weight. More tests scheduled for April.