Tag Archives: american

‘Virtual breast’ could improve cancer detection

That results in lots of needless worry for women and their families — not to mention the time, discomfort and expense of additional tests, including ultrasounds and biopsies. Recently, a different type of test, ultrasound elastography, has been used to pinpoint possible tumors throughout the body, including in the breast. “It uses imaging to measure the stiffness of tissue, and cancer tissues are stiff,” says Jingfeng Jiang, a biomedical engineer at Michigan Technological University. Those images can be breathtakingly clear: Jiang shows one elastogram in which the tumor is as different from normal breast tissue as a yolk is from the white in a fried egg. …

What to anticipate after you’ve heard those dreaded words ‘you have breast cancer’

“Most of the time, there’s no bad news,” says Karen Rizzo, MD, 2015 president of the Pennsylvania Medical Society and a practicing physician in Lancaster. “Unfortunately though, some will be told they should have a biopsy, possibly leading to those dreaded words ‘you have cancer.'” What happens next depends upon the patient and her situation, says Dr. …

New blood test determines whether you have or are likely to get cancer

“The test could allow earlier cancer detection, so helping to save peoples’ lives,” said Diana Anderson, a researcher involved in the work from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Bradford in West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. To develop this test, Anderson and colleagues took blood samples from a group of people that included healthy individuals, cancer patients and people believed to be at a higher risk than normal to develop cancer…

Decision Analysis Can Help Women Make Choices about Breast Reconstruction — ScienceDaily

The special topic article by Mia K. Markey, PhD, and colleagues of The University of Texas at Austin and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, introduces plastic surgeons to the use of decision analysis to help women navigate decisions about breast reconstruction after mastectomy for breast cancer. “Decision analysis provides structure for methodic, thoughtful decision-making through the use of reason, logic, and mathematics,” the authors write. Decision Analysis Helps Sort Through Breast Reconstruction Options Decision analysis is defined as ” an exhaustive, iterative process that involves identifying alternatives, obtaining information about the uncertainty of outcomes, and clarifying preferences and values.” Routinely used in business, decision analysis is increasingly applied to complex medical decisions as well. …

Gene that increases incidence of acute myelogenous leukaemia discovered

Led by Associate Professor Chng Wee Joo, Deputy Director and Senior Principal Investigator at CSI Singapore and Director of the National University Cancer Institute, Singapore, the scientists discovered that inhibition of Leo1 and Leo1 downstream signalling pathways provide an avenue for targeted treatment of AML. The findings were recently published in Cancer Research, the official journal of the American Association of Cancer Research. …

Many throat cancer patients can skip neck surgery

“For patients that achieve a complete response, neck surgery is probably unnecessary,” says Thomas J. Galloway, MD, Attending Physician and Director of Clinical Research at Fox Chase and lead author on the study. After radiation and chemotherapy to remove tumors from the tonsils or back of the tongue, many head and neck cancer patients still have persistent lumps in their neck, albeit perhaps smaller than when they were first diagnosed. “The question is: Do we need to remove those lumps, as well, or can we just let them dissolve on their own?” asks Dr. …