Question:
I hope that someone can help me by pointing me in the right direction
regarding information on skin cancer. I've searched the net and all I've been able to find thus far is general information on this topic. I would like to get more detailed information. Perhaps some studies or papers.
Answer:
Adjuvant chemotherapy is sometimes used for melanoma.
Chemotherapy is also used for cutaneous T-cell lymphomas including mycosis fungoides. The more common kinds of skin cancer such as squamous cell carcinoma and basal cell carcinoma are better treated surgically, in fact topical chemo is contraindicated in basal cell carcinoma because it seems to cure the surfacecancer while encouraging underlying spread.
Did you look in PDQ? This is a database updated monthly by the NCI. It has descriptions of the various kinds, stages, and treatments of most cancers and it
is easy to use. Find it at http://cancernet.nci.nih.gov/pdq.htm. Get the
summary on skin cancer for doctors, rather than the one for patients. This
should have lots of good stuff, and it is accompanied by many refs she can look
up.
You can also look for refs to articles in MEDLINE at PubMed at
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Go to the Advanced Search screen for doing Medline
searches. Select "MeSH Terms" from the pull-down over the Enter Query box. In
the box, type terms you are interested in. These must be from our controlled
vocabulary (MeSH) and this is the most efficient way to search, though you can
add in textword terms to narrow the search down by using the Add Terms box set on All Fields or Text Word.
