This is a placeholder for Testicular Cancer.
The discovery and use of Platinum based chemotherapy as part of a combination of drugs has transformed Testicular Cancer into a major success story over the last 30 years. It has gone from a sub 10% success rate to well above 90%. So why doesn’t this work with other cancers?
References
Image is of Mr. Testicle

This is a holding place to keep track of proposed articles that might prove useful to people interested in CUP and rare cancers. Proposed articles include “Access to Medical Records”, “NICE and the proposed guidelines”, “Chemo – sucess for Testicular Cancer not repeated elsewhere”, “MicroRNA” analysis and potential benefits to CUP”.
Feel free to add suggestions as to other usefult ideas or possible links.

Not the most catchy of titles. The only reason for including this one at the moment is that it was an added complication to Matt’s particular cancer. The image is of ‘ordinary’ epithelial cells. [1]
Matt’s first pathology result included the following: -
“Microscopic Report
Viable tumour cells are seen which in places form pseudo-rosettes around vessels and are characterised by an anaplastic rhabdoid morphology with abundant refractile intracytoplasmic globules. Many of the cells show multinucleation and many also show very prominent amphophillic nucleoli. Small numbers of mature lymphocytes are scattered throughout the …

What did people do before the internet and search engines arrived?
I’m guessing that for the most part the consultant’s words were the ‘be all and end all’ of finding information. Digging around in medical libraries would have been time consuming and frustating without prior experience in this area. Digging around in a general library would have offered very little. Now, however, the first step for many after the visit to the consultant, will be to open Google and see what the web has to say about a particular cancer or treatment regime.

Each and every day for every one of us, new cells are being created. Each time a new cell is created there is the possibility that it might not be a perfect copy. After all for a cell to be a perfect copy, the 3 billion base pairs that make up the 20 thousand plus genes located on the 23 chromosome pairs that make up the human genome, needs to be replicated to perfection.
Given that we replicate 6 billion cells per hour, serious perfection is needed to avoid errors.