A new study suggests there may be ways to reduce these dangerous side effects. Collaborators from the University of Michigan, the National Cancer Institute and the University of Alabama looked at naproxen, which is known to have a lower cardiovascular risk than other NSAIDs. Naproxen, like most NSAIDs and aspirin, does increase the risk for gastric ulcers or bleeding…
But a new University of Michigan study indicates that using those words can have an unintended negative effect. David Hauser, a U-M doctoral student in psychology, and colleague Norbert Schwarz of the University of Southern California, found in three studies that exposure to metaphoric language relating cancer to an enemy significantly lessens the extent to which people consider cancer-prevention behaviors. …
Patients who were told they had a 1-in-10 chance of winning $50 were more likely to complete home stool blood tests that help screen for colon cancer, according to a new study led by a researcher at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System and University of Michigan. The findings appear in a special issue of Annals of Internal Medicine…
The finding suggests the potential to reclassify the disease based on genetic markers and moves thyroid cancer into a position to benefit more from precision medicine. “This understanding of the genomic landscape of thyroid cancer will refine how it’s classified and improve molecular diagnosis. This will help us separate those patients who need aggressive treatment from those whose tumor is never likely to grow or spread,” says Thomas J. …
A new study by researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center finds that in some parts of the country, about two-thirds of colon cancer patients will receive laparoscopic colectomy, a minimally invasive procedure to remove part of the colon. In other parts of the country, the rate was zero. …
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…
They used the platform to identify a novel antibody that is undergoing further investigation as a potential treatment for breast, ovarian and other cancers. In research published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers in the lab of Stephen Weiss at the U-M Life Sciences Institute detail an approach that replicates the native environment of cancer cells and increases the likelihood that drugs effective against the growth of tumor cells in test tube models will also stop cancer from growing in humans. The researchers have used their method to identify an antibody that stops breast cancer tumor growth in animal models, and they are investigating the antibody as a potential treatment in humans. “Discovering new targets for cancer therapeutics is a long and tedious undertaking, and identifying and developing a potential drug to specifically hit that target without harming healthy cells is a daunting task,” Weiss said. …
Scientists at the University of Michigan and the U-M Health System recently discovered a protein mutation that causes the devastating disease dyskeratosis congenita, in which precious hematopoietic stem cells can’t regenerate and make new blood. People with DC age prematurely and are prone to cancer and bone marrow failure. But the study findings reach far beyond the roughly one in 1 million known DC patients, and could ultimately lead to developing new drugs that prevent cancer from spreading, said Jayakrishnan Nandakumar, assistant professor in the U-M Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. …
The study shows the Edge™ Radiosurgery Suite is able to target cancer tumors within 1 mm, providing sub-millimeter accuracy with extreme precision. “Radiosurgery is just one shot of precision radiation with a very high dose to treat tumors,” says study lead author Ning Wen, Ph.D., a physicist with the Department of Radiation Oncology at Henry Ford. …
The experimental approach, based on U-M research, delivers two different genes directly into the brains of patients following the operation to remove the bulk of their tumors. The idea: trigger immune activity within the brain itself to kill remaining tumor cells — the ones neurosurgeons can’t take out, which make this type of tumor so dangerous. …