Word: testicular
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With a few notable exceptions, the treatment of anyone whose cancer has spread throughout the body has been more about prolonging lives by a few months than about curing the underlying disease. But the amazing progress in the treatment of advanced cases of testicular cancer - made famous by seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong - has doctors wondering if maybe they have overlooked one of the body's most basic weapons in the fight against disease: heat...
...That's what three researchers from Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore believe. In a highly speculative, but well-reasoned, article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, they argue that testicular cancer is amenable to current treatments because testicular cancer cells are particularly vulnerable to modest increases in temperature - in the same way that normal sperm cells are vulnerable to increases in temperature. (Indeed, without the testes' somewhat cooler environment outside the body, most sperm cells would degenerate and be unable to fertilize eggs...
...That doesn't mean that heat, per se, is currently a part of standard testicular cancer treatment. But whatever it is that makes testicular cancer cells vulnerable to heat, the Hopkins authors argue, makes the cells more vulnerable to radiation and chemotherapy. Because they originate in the testes, those cancer cells are more vulnerable to heat, radiation and chemotherapy even after they migrate throughout the body...
...March of last year, Cosgriff, a big, 6’7 left-hander for the Harvard team, sat slumped and emotionless on the couch at his home in the New York area, doing absolutely nothing. After months of treatment, he was mired in his third cycle of chemotherapy for testicular cancer...
Fortunately, mumps doesn't usually cause problems beyond swelling and misery that last about five days. Even so, doctors watch for signs of meningitis or, in young men, a testicular inflammation that could theoretically lead to infertility...