Tag Archives: national

Chest radiation to treat childhood cancer increases patients’ risk of breast cancer

Wilms tumor is a rare childhood kidney cancer that can spread to the lungs. When this spread occurs, patients receive a relatively low dose of 12-14 Gray of radiation therapy to the entire chest. To see if such exposure to radiation affects patients’ risk of developing breast cancer, Norman Breslow, PhD, of the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, led a team that studied nearly 2500 young women who had been treated for Wilms tumor during childhood and who had survived until at least 15 years of age. …

New hope for potential prostate cancer patients — ScienceDaily

The only place in the Southeast offering the MRI-US image fusion technique is at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Program for Personalized Prostate Cancer Care. It is estimated that 2014 will see more than 240,000 new cases of prostate cancer, and more than 29,000 deaths from the disease, according to the National Cancer Institute…

New drug could help in battle against cervical cancer

A Cancer Research UK-funded UK study led by researchers at the University of Leicester, with key collaborators from the Universities of Glasgow, Manchester and Edinburgh, has discovered that adding the investigational agent cediranib, which has been developed by the multinational pharmaceutical and biologics company AstraZeneca, to standard chemotherapy may be beneficial for patients with metastatic or recurrent cervical cancer and could pave the way for future treatment of the disease. Professor Paul Symonds from the Department of Cancer Studies and Molecular Medicine at the University of Leicester and a consultant at Leicester’s Hospitals, explained: “Cancers develop their own blood supply and cancers of the cervix with a well-developed blood supply can have a particularly bad outcome for the patient. “One of the substances which increase new blood vessels in cervical cancer is Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF). The experimental drug cediranib blocks the receptor for VEGF in the cancer, potentially limiting its growth in the body. …

New hope for potential prostate cancer patients

The only place in the Southeast offering the MRI-US image fusion technique is at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Program for Personalized Prostate Cancer Care. It is estimated that 2014 will see more than 240,000 new cases of prostate cancer, and more than 29,000 deaths from the disease, according to the National Cancer Institute. Jeffrey Nix, M.D., along with colleague Soroush Rais-Bahrami, M.D., both assistant professors in the UAB Department of Urology, studied the MRI-US image fusion as fellows at the NCI. Nix and Rais-Bahrami are two of a select few urologists in the United States trained to utilize this technology; together they have five years’ experience using this approach. …

Thyroid cancer genome analysis finds markers of aggressive tumors

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. …

Years after treatment for HER2-positve early stage breast cancer, trastuzumab continues to show life-altering benefit — ScienceDaily

They found that the use of trastuzumab produced a 37 percent improvement in survival and a 40 percent reduction in risk of cancer occurrence, compared to patients treated with chemotherapy alone. These findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, demonstrate how important trastuzumab has been to the treatment of this form of breast cancer, says the study’s lead author, Edith A. Perez, M.D., deputy director at large, Mayo Clinic Cancer Center and director of the Breast Cancer Translational Genomics Program at Mayo Clinic in Florida. “This long follow-up of patients shows that we have really altered the natural history of this disease,” says Dr…

Ovarian cancer: New test can help doctors choose best treatment

Successful treatment depends in part on accurately identifying the type of tumor, but this can be difficult. As a result, many women with cancer are not sent to the right specialist surgeon, or those with a benign cyst may have a more serious operation than they need. In a study published today in the British Medical Journal, an international team led by Imperial College London and KU Leuven, Belgium describe a new test, called ADNEX, which can discriminate between benign and malignant tumors, and identify different types of malignant tumor, with a high level of accuracy. The test is based on the patient’s clinical information, a simple tumor marker blood test and features that can be identified on an ultrasound scan…

Obesity accelerates aging of the liver, researchers find using novel biological aging clock

Although it had long been suspected that obesity ages a person faster, it hadn’t been possible to prove the theory, said study first author Steve Horvath, a professor of human genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a professor of biostatistics at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. …

Drinking decaf or regular coffee maybe good for the liver, study suggests

Coffee consumption is highly prevalent with more than half of all Americans over 18 drinking on average three cups each day according to a 2010 report from the National Coffee Association. Moreover, the International Coffee Association reports that coffee consumption has increased one percent each year since the 1980s, increasing to two percent in recent years. Previous studies found that coffee consumption may help lower the risk of developing diabetes, cardiovascular disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, cirrhosis, and liver cancer. “Prior research found that drinking coffee may have a possible protective effect on the liver…