Due to recent researches performed by a prestigious Italian university, a skin cancer cream could be used to replace plastic surgery, says the Associated Press. The treatment was discovered in Italy after multiple tests performed by doctors on more than 1000 patients. The news is very optimistic for skin cancer patients because it enables them to avoid disfiguring surgery; moreover, the cream is painless and side-effect free.
Skin cancer is one of the most common types of cancer at present. Given these circumstances, medical researchers do everything in their power to replace the existing treatment with a more efficient and less painful one.
Although the traditional surgery is very efficient, there are many side effects, such as, disfiguration that patients and doctors would like to avoid. For them, Italian researchers have created a cream containing rhenium-188, that is, a radioactive isotope that could treat basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma without leaving scars.
The greatest worry of doctors who have to treat various forms of cancer is that healthy cells will be affected and even destroyed by chemotherapy, radiation therapy and cytostatic agents. Consequently, a lot of efforts have been recently made to introduce medical apparatuses and treatments that function only on ill cells.
The new skin cancer cream is in compliance with all the aforementioned requests. Doctors use a surgical foil to protect the healthy tissues; they apply the paste on the affected skin and remove it after two hours. 95% of the patients have been completely cured after one therapy, whereas 85% needed three treatment sessions.
Dr. Maria Gonzalez from Cardiff University told the press that the new treatment will most likely appeal to certain groups of patients. So far, the cream has been requested by elderly patients with very large tumors, usually placed on the face. They preferred to test the cream because excising the tumors was too risky.
The new therapy has to undergo several other tests in Germany in order to be recognized as genuine. Even so, doctors emphasize that this cream must be regarded as an alternative treatment to the traditional therapies.
Melanoma can be cured if it is diagnosed and treated when the tumor is thin and has not deeply invaded the skin.
The melanoma online risk calculator is designed by scientists at the National Cancer Institute, the University of California, and the University of Pennsylvania, to estimate an individual’s absolute risk of developing invasive melanoma cancer.