Michael Samuelson:
Hello, and welcome to CareCast, brought to you by the Cancer Survivors Network, a free service from your American Cancer Society. I’m Michael Samuelson, your host. Today we’ll be discussing cancer pain, and joining me by phone we have four guests, all survivors and/or family caregivers.

Now, as a cancer survivor myself, I’m looking forward to this evening’s discussion. First let me briefly introduce our guests, and then I’ll open up the discussion as we talk about things such as barriers to pain relief; advocating for yourself and for family members; how pain affects quality of life. We’ll also talk about the myths and the facts about pain relief and the issue that’s growing more and more, and that’s the issue of under-treatment of pain.

Our first guest is Susan, a caregiver from Connecticut. Susan is married. She is 58 years old and has five adult children. Welcome to the program, Susan.

Susan:
Thank you, Michael. It’s great to be here.

Michael Samuelson:
Great! Susan, reading from this and taking a look at the information you provided us, your brother was living close to your family. You were a very, very good friend and he was diagnosed with melanoma and had surgery for it back in 1995, and at that point the outcome was relatively positive. However, on a check-up in 1998, he found a freckle under his fingernail and unfortunately it was another melanoma. They amputated the tip of the finger, but about a month later realized that the cancer had spread to his lungs. Your brother was involved in several clinical trials, but unfortunately they didn’t work, and during this time his biggest fear, understandably, was pain. In the fall of 1998, in Florida, the cancer spread to his brain. He had emergency surgery and you returned with him to a hospital in the northeast, and while he was there he began having one pain problem after another. You continually advocated for better pain control, but apparently the staff did not seem interested, and unfortunately that’s a story that’s often told. Your sister joined you in the hospital where you spent the last five or six weeks of your brother’s life with him. You were able, through constant advocacy, to eventually get adequate pain control for your brother. Your brother finally seemed relatively comfortable the last weeks of his life, and you’re a nurse, an American Cancer Society staff member, and a charter member of the Cancer Pain Initiative, and I thank you so much for joining the program, Susan.

Susan:
Thank you.

Michael Samuelson:
Our next guest is Yvette, a cancer survivor from Maryland. Yvette is 46 years old and single. Welcome to the program, Yvette. …read the rest of this entry»

A bacterium naturally living in soil that generates an endotoxin lethal to insects (including genera Dipetera, Coleoptera, and Lepidoptera among others). The endotoxin released is deadly due to the increased pH and activation of peptides that create pores in the insect’s gut initiated by the toxin. This combination causes the destruction of cells inside the target, leading to the insect’s death. Currently, researchers are attempting to integrate the baterium’s insect toxins into plant DNA in order to create crops resistant to different insect species.

Tissue taken from one part of an individual organism’s body and then moved or transplanted to another location within that same organism. Rejection is rarely (if ever) a problem since the donor and recipient are the same individual. Skin transplants are a common example. Autografts are also used when bone marrow is harvested from an individual and stored for later use. This marrow tissue is transplanted back into the donor to replace tissue destroyed during chemotherapy.

The process which, when functioning normally, programs cells to self-destruct at an appropriate moment in an organism’s life-cycle. If the apoptotic process malfunctions in a cell, uncontrolled cell growth may result, which can contribute to the development of cancer. Such disruption of apoptosis may be associated with an inherited genetic mutation or a somatic cell genetic mutation.

The effects of alleles at two different loci are additive when their combined effect is equal to the sum of their individual effects. Additive effects are most easily understood in the context of continuous (quantitative) traits. Consider a disease in which two loci, locus 1 with alleles A and a, and locus 1 with alleles B and b, contribute to the phenotype. If each allele represented by a capital letter contributes a score of 2 to the phenotype, and each allele represented by a small letter contributes a score of 3 to the phenotype, then if the alleles at loci 1 and 2 are additive, the resultant pheno-types for the possible genotypes are as follows: AABB - 8; AABb - 9; Aabb - 11; AaBB - 10; AaBb - 10; Aabb - 11; aaBB -10; aaBb - 9; aabb - 12.

The manner in which an organism adapts to a new environment or to a change in the old. For microbes, these physiological modifications often involve enzymatic changes (changes that modify proteins that speed up biochemical reactions). These modifications allow the organism to utilize a new nutrient source for survival.