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Lung cancer risk model refines decisions to screen

Computed Tomography (CT) screening can identify lung tumors while they are still treatable, and the US National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) found that annual screening of high-risk smokers can reduce lung cancer mortality by 20%. The best way to identify those at high risk remains an important question. …

Mental health inequalities in detection of breast cancer — ScienceDaily

The research was led by Dr Alex J Mitchell, consultant psychiatrist in the Department of Cancer Studies, University of Leicester. Studies have previously shown there is a higher mortality rate due to cancer in people with mental illness, perhaps because of high rates of risk factors such as smoking…

Maternal insulin resistance changes pancreas development, increases risk of metabolic disorders in offspring

According to researchers from the Joslin Diabetes Center and the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, “Since insulin resistance alters the metabolic status in the affected individuals, its presence in women during pregnancy has the potential to be detrimental to growth and metabolism in the offspring. Thus, insulin resistance directly impacts pregnant women and also their offspring.” The research team — which included Sevim Kahraman, Ercument Dirice, Dario DeJesus, Jiang Hu and Rohit Kulkarni — used a mouse model of insulin resistance to find out how it affects metabolism and endocrine pancreas development in the offspring. Insulin is a hormone created in the beta cells (β-cells) of the pancreas. …

Vitamin D deficiency, depression linked in international study

“Rather than being one of many factors, vitamin D could have a regulative role in the development of SAD,” said Alan Stewart of the University of Georgia College of Education. An international research partnership between UGA, the University of Pittsburgh and the Queensland University of Technology in Australia reported the finding in the November 2014 issue of the journal Medical Hypotheses. Stewart and Michael Kimlin from QUT’s School of Public Health and Social Work conducted a review of more than 100 leading articles and found a relationship between vitamin D and seasonal depression…

People putting their lives at risk by dismissing cancer symptoms

More than half (53 per cent) of 1,700 people who completed a health questionnaire said they had experienced at least one red-flag cancer ‘alarm’ symptom during the previous three months. But only two per cent of them thought that cancer was a possible cause…

Triple-negative breast cancer patients should undergo genetic screening — ScienceDaily

“Clinicians need to think hard about screening all their triple-negative patients for mutations because there is a lot of value in learning that information, both in terms of the risk of recurrence to the individual and the risk to family members. In addition, there may be very specific therapeutic benefits of knowing if you have a mutation in a particular gene,” says Fergus Couch, Ph.D., professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at Mayo Clinic and lead author of the study. The study found that almost 15 percent of triple-negative breast cancer patients had deleterious (harmful) mutations in predisposition genes. The vast majority of these mutations appeared in genes involved in the repair of DNA damage, suggesting that the origins of triple-negative breast cancer may be different from other forms of the disease. …