Female family physicians are twice as likely to order the HPV test (in addition to screening for cervical cancer through pap smears) for low-risk women aged 30-65 than their male counterparts, according to the findings published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. …
In the Nov. 7 issue of Cell, investigators pinpoint two cellular enzymes — Type 2 phosphatidylinositol-5-phosphate 4-kinases and β (Type 2 PIP kinases) — as essential for cancer growth when cells have lost p53, the powerful tumor-suppressor gene long dubbed the "guardian of the genome." More than half of all cancers lose this gene, allowing these cancers to grow at will. The researchers discovered that the Type 2 PIP kinases are not critical for the growth of normal cells but become essential for cell growth when p53 is lost due to mutations or deletions. The scientists showed, in animal and lab studies of human cancer cells, that targeting these molecules effectively shuts down the growth of p53 mutant cancers…
Although children in the United States who are treated for retinoblastoma have a 95 percent survival rate that figure drops below 50 percent for children in developing countries. However, surviving retinoblastoma is just the first hurdle. Typically, "survivors experience moderate to severe vision loss" and in some cases loss of both eyes, but early detection and treatment can increase the chances of survival and vision preservation…
Duo Zhou, a biostatistician at pharmaceutical company Pfizer in New York and colleagues Dinesh Mital and Shankar Srinivasan of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, point out that data pattern recognition is widely used in machine-learning applications in science. Computer algorithms trained on historical data can be used to analyze current information and detect patterns and then predict possible future patterns. However, this powerful knowledge discovery technology is little used in medicine…
Currently, computer-aided detection provides a "second opinion" to a radiologist in locating suspicious regions within mammograms. Next, radiologists will ultimately be able to use computer-extracted lesion characteristics when performing a diagnosis to assess whether the tumor is cancerous. …
"Clearly this drug has many potential new applications," Gohil said. …
Results from the research, which looked retrospectively at the treatment of women diagnosed with cervical cancer during a two year period, showed 18% of cervical cancer patients in the East African country died within two years of a diagnosis. Dr Ian Hampson, from The University of Manchester’s Institute of Cancer Sciences who oversaw the research, said the findings, published in PLOS One this week, add further weight to the call to spend more on cancer screening and prevention in Kenya…
The study, published October 29 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, analyzes how the timing of gene expression is regulated in the notochord, the evolutionary and developmental precursor of the backbone. The notochord is the main feature that sets humans, mice, sea squirts and related animals (collectively known as chordates) apart from flies, worms and mollusks, and is essential for their development. A crucial player in the development of the notochord is the Brachyury gene, which encodes a DNA-binding protein that switches on the expression of numerous notochord genes and ensures their sequential deployment during the formation of this pivotal structure…
A study of nearly eight million Swedes aged 15 and over found that among the 12,669 young people diagnosed with cancer between the age of 15 and 30 there was a 60% increased risk of suicide or attempted suicide. The risk was highest during the first year immediately after diagnosis when suicidal behaviour was 1.5-fold (150%) higher among the cancer patients compared with the cancer-free group. Dr Donghao Lu, a PhD student in the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet (Stockholm, Sweden), said: "We found that there were 22 suicides among the cancer patients versus 14 expected and 136 attempts at suicide versus 80 expected. This equates to an extra 64 instances of suicidal behaviour among the 12,669 young cancer people…
The findings were presented October 28 at the 15th World Conference on Lung Cancer. Physicians look to lymph nodes to stage essentially all cancers, including mesothelioma. The presence or absence of metastatic cancer cells in lymph nodes affects prognosis and also typically dictates the optimal treatment strategy. But posterior intercostal lymph nodes, which are located between the ribs near the spine, have not been previously used to stage or guide treatment of malignant pleural mesothelioma or any other cancer. …