Tag Archives: american

Coffee consumption reduces risk of liver cancer

"Our research confirms past claims that coffee is good for your health, and particularly the liver," said Carlo La Vecchia, MD, study author from the department of epidemiology, Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche "Mario Negri," and department of clinical sciences and community health, Università degli Studi di Milan, Italy. "The favorable effect of coffee on liver cancer might be mediated by coffee’s proven prevention of diabetes, a known risk factor for the disease, or for its beneficial effects on cirrhosis and liver enzymes." Researchers performed a meta-analysis of articles published from 1996 through September 2012, ultimately studying 16 high-quality studies and a total of 3,153 cases. This research fills an important gap as the last meta-analysis was published in 2007, and since then there has been data published on more than 900 cases of HCC. …

Skid row cancer study has implications for treatment

In papers published in the American Journal of Public Health and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Aronowitz, professor and chair of Penn’s Department of History and Sociology of Science, characterizes the events then and screenings for prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, in more recent years as "part of one continuous story of how medical and lay people came to believe in the efficacy of population screening followed by aggressive treatment without solid supporting scientific evidence." "This is a call to reflection about how we deal with medical knowledge production and medical technological innovation," Aronowitz said. …

‘Phenotype switching’ can make melanoma become metastatic, resistant to drugs

The findings were published in the journal Cancer Discovery and are currently available online. "We were able to demonstrate for the first time that different receptors within a single signaling pathway — in this case, the Wnt signaling pathway — can guide the phenotypic plasticity of tumor cells, and increased signaling of Wnt5A in particular can result in an increase in highly invasive tumor cells that are less sensitive to existing treatments for metastatic melanoma," said Ashani Weeraratna, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Tumor Microenvironment and Metastasis Program of Wistar’s NCI-designated Cancer Center, and senior corresponding author on the manuscript. …

Promise for treating papillary thyroid cancer

R. Dadu and colleagues from M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, will report on a series of patients with advanced metastatic PTC and the V600E BRAF mutation who were treated with the selective BRAF inhibitor vemurafenib in a poster presentation at the upcoming 83rd Annual Meeting of the American Thyroid Association, October 16-20, in San Juan, Puerto Rico…

Men-only hepatitis B mutation explains higher cancer rates

"This is the first mutation found that can explain the gender disparity in incidence of hepatocellular carcinoma," says Bum-Joon Kim of Seoul National University, Korea, an author on the study. In the study, the researchers randomly collected and analyzed serum samples from 292 patients with chronic HBV infection who visited one of 3 hospitals in Korea from 2003-2005. Previous studies had suggested that a gene mutation known as W4P/R was associated with higher incidence of liver cancer and cirrhosis. They developed an assay to specifically identify HBV with the W4P/R mutation…

Vitamin D does not contribute to kidney stones

However, a study of 2,012 participants — published in the American Journal of Public Health -found no statistically relevant association between 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25 (OH)D) serum level in the range of 20 to 100 ng/mL and the incidence of kidney stones. This study — led by Cedric F. Garland, DrPH, adjunct professor in the Division of Epidemiology, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine — used data from the nonprofit public health promotion organization GrassrootsHealth to follow more than 2,000 men and women of all ages for 19 months. …

High variability among primary care physicians in rate of PSA screening

Using complete Medicare Part A and B data for Texas, the researchers selected PCPs whose patient panels included at least 20 men 75 years or older without a prior diagnosis of prostate cancer. Primary care physicians were identified as generalist physicians who saw a man on 3 or more occasions in 2009. PSA screening rates for 2010 were estimated…

Overexpressed protein to be culprit in certain thyroid cancers

The scientists found that over-activation of a certain protein in hormone-secreting cells helps fuel medullary thyroid cancer cells in mice as well as in human cells, making the protein a potentially good target for therapies to inhibit the growth of these cancer cells. The discovery by the multidisciplinary team at UT Southwestern has implications for neuroendocrine cancers that arise in organs farther removed from the brain, including the lung and the pancreas. Although rare, medullary thyroid cancer is often fatal. …