Prince Of Wales Hospital In Hong Kong First In Asia To Offer Cancer Patients Image-Guided RapidArc® Radiotherapy

Similar to the high-speed 640 slice CTs, using Arc technology is the most logical thing to do. It really is quite amazing to watch these machines at work.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/211522.php

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Guangdong Humen People Suspected Cancer Due To Fumes Emitted From Power Plants - Refractory Industry

The nasopharynx being the airway brusher, fumes and pesticide-bearing wood dusts are always suspect causative agents.

The Humen people are among the most susceptible in the world to NPC and it doesn't help to be fogged in power plant fumes...

http://business.ezinemark.com/guangdong-humen-people-suspected-cancer-due-to-fumes-emitted-from-power-plants-refractory-industry-31c8dac7a09.html

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Antioxidants for deafness

Oxygen free radicals is now the scapegoat for everything from diabetes to cancer; so why not deafness?

We've always relegated presbycusis to just another one of the many unavoidable stigma of ageing, inexplicable and irreversible. Ageing is the next frontier of medicine and free radicals are the sands of time in the storm of decay.

Sci Am reviews a fascinating recent animal study that demonstrated slowing of age-related deafness in rats by the administration of antioxidants. An elegant way of elucidating the mechanism of disease AND its treatment in a single experiment.

Unfortunately, the pharma industry will only seize this to sell us a plethora of antioxidants rather than have us relook at our toxic modern diets and lifestyles!

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=preventing-hearing-loss

Things aren't always what they seem at first

Now that 4D IMRT is all the buzz, we are seeing more and more studies on the volume changes of tumors througout the course of chemoradiation. This is imaging science at its best, monitoring progress and titrating treatment according to burden of disease. Perhaps we can learn something in managing other pathologies; like infection for example.

Weekly volume and dosimetric changes during chemoradiotherapy with intensity-modulated radiation therapy for head and neck cancer: a prospective observational study. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20338474)
Bhide SA, Davies M, Burke K, McNair HA, Hansen V, Barbachano Y, El-Hariry IA, Newbold K, Harrington KJ, Nutting CM.
Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys. 2010 Apr;76(5):1360-8.

The Master speaks

When it comes to surgical management of NPC, William Wei always has the last word.

So, it's good that he issues refreshers like this one to keep our management strategies abreast with latest developments.

This appears as the article 'Current management strategy of nasopharyngeal carcinoma' in Clin Exp Otorhinolaryngol. 2010 Mar;3(1):1-12
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20379395)

Other review articles of relevance are linked as well.
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=link&linkname=pubmed_pubmed&uid=20379395)

New in OSA

This is music to my ears.

Authors Xu H, Huang W, Yu L, and Chen L. published in Acta Otolaryngolica this week an article entitled 'Sound spectral analysis of snoring sound and site of obstruction in obstructive sleep apnea syndrome.'
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20377505)

They showed objectively what we have known intuitively, that the higher the obstruction the lower the pitch of noise generated. In fact they found that lower obstructions had a greater proportion of >800Hz and >2000Hz first-snore sounds than higher obstructions.

This confirms the way we clinically differentiate stertor and stridor, and might even spawn a new wave of polysomnogram parameters.