Study: Tetanus shot may aid treatment of deadly brain cancer [View all]
Source: AP-Excite
By MALCOLM RITTER
NEW YORK (AP) — Can a tetanus shot help treat brain cancer? A small study hints that it might.
A dose of tetanus vaccine let patients live longer when added to an experimental treatment for the most common and deadly kind of brain tumor, researchers report.
It "put the immune system on high alert," paving the way for the experimental treatment to work better in attacking the disease, said researcher Kristen Batich of the Duke University Medical Center.
In a paper released Wednesday by the journal Nature, she and others describe a study of 12 patients. Some who got the tetanus shot lived years longer than those who didn't.
FULL story at link.
Sandy Hillburn poses for a photo in her apartment in Fort Lee, N.J., on Tuesday, March 10, 2015. In April 2006, when she was diagnosed with glioblastoma, the most common and deadly kind of brain tumor, she recalled, "I was told I had two to three months to live." But she was offered a slot in an experimental study involving adding the tetanus-diphtheria vaccine to an experimental treatment for glioblastoma. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20150311/us-med--brain_cancer-tetanus-07ff010366.html
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