HealthNotes

New Treatments for GI Cancer

What if you could go to your primary care doctor’s office and receive a simple blood test capable of detecting a gastrointestinal cancer in its earliest stages, so you could immediately seek personalized cancer therapy? What sounds like science fiction is closer to reality and a beacon of hope for the 343,000 Americans diagnosed with cancers of the digestive tract every year.

The most common gastrointestinal cancers (GI) are colorectal cancer, esophageal cancer, gastric (stomach) cancer, liver cancer, and pancreatic cancer. Approximately 62,000 Americans are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer annually, while more than 150,000 will face a diagnosis of colorectal cancer. While the incidence of colorectal cancer has dropped since the mid-1980s due to increased screening measures, it has been rising in recent years among people younger than 50. In response to this, in May 2021, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force lowered the recommended colonoscopy screening age from 50 to 45.

New TIF® procedure is a game changer

Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) was making Annie Nathenson’s life miserable. 

“I’m an avid motorcycle rider, I lift weights, I do yoga and Pilates, I play golf and I eat a vegetarian diet, but acid reflux (when stomach acid repeatedly flows back into the esophagus) was interfering with my ability to live my life,” says the La Quinta resident. So, a few years ago, she went to see James Conti, MD, who is Board Certified in Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology.

“He said it was time for me to go on a proton pump inhibitor (PPI),” she continues, referring to a medication that’s often the first line of treatment for GERD. “I took it for a couple of years and did fine. Then it suddenly stopped working and I started having difficulty swallowing, I was feeling pressure in my chest, food wasn’t tasting good anymore and I was having a lot of reflux and heartburn. I even had to leave a restaurant once because I was choking.”

In fact, her symptoms got so bad that Nathenson ended up in the emergency room with chest pain, thinking she was having a heart attack.

An ischemic stroke occurs when a blood vessel in the brain is blocked by a blood clot. The only FDA-approved nonsurgical treatment for this type of stroke is to intravenously administer a clot-busting drug called tissue plasminogen activator (tPA). This thrombolytic therapy can help dissolve the blood clot, restore blood flow to the brain (what’s known in medical terms as reperfusion) and lessen the brain damage that a stroke can cause.

But there’s a catch.

To be effective, tPA must be administered within 4.5 hours after time of onset of stroke symptoms. That’s why it’s critical to seek medical attention as soon as someone starts to exhibit the signs of a stroke.