WASHINGTON – People know little about the deadliest form of skin cancer as it is a little-studied type.After his death, Martin Whatley’s classic rock ‘n’ roll guitar proved his last weapon against it.
Whatley’s stricken widow put up Whatley’s perfect 1964 Fender Stratocaster for auction on eBay, donating half the income for Merkel cell carcinoma research and the rest to pay his medical bills.She knew scientists didn’t have sufficient funding to study a killer so uncommon that few doctors identify it and know little how to treat it.
She coiled donating $15,000 last year to the University of Washington — not where her husband was treated, but where Merkel cell authority Dr.Paul Nghiem is making efforts to gather samples of patients’ tumors to classify the genes that fuel the cancer.Merkel cell carcinoma provides a miserable sight of the upsetting intersection of research dollars and the suffering wrought by uncommon diseases.
It’s a cancer only known as different from melanoma — even more hostile, and requiring different treatment — about 15 years ago. Diagnoses have reached manifold about 1,500 a year.
Its first sign is a painless bump, often reddish to purple, that looks like gentle cyst, confusing even dermatologists about whether removal is needed or not. But Merkel cell carcinoma spreads quickly once that bump emerges. As many as a third of patients die in three years that is double to melanoma’s death rate.
Chemotherapy
There have been no well-controlled studies of the best treatment yet.Intense radiation is key — unlike melanoma, Merkel cell carcinoma often seems radiation-sensitive, Nghiem states.There is no proof that including chemotherapy right away helps, and it may even worsen patients’ chances, he further adds.
Sun-exposed skin
First inclusive report on indications and risk factors published last month. It almost exclusively hits white-skinned over age 50 that have a sun-exposed skin.And while a frail immune system greatly increases the risk but most patients, strangely, have normal immunity.
Meanwhile, a small society of Merkel cell patients has banded together for awareness, of doctors and the newly diagnosed — both to help them in finding the way for treatment and to evoke others to donate tumor-tissue samples to Nghiem’s lab.
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