Tag Archives: performance

Antacids linked to better survival in head and neck cancer

Reflux can be a common side effect of chemotherapy or radiation treatment for head and neck cancer. Doctors at the University of Michigan frequently prescribe two types of antacids – proton pump inhibitors or histamine 2 blockers – to help treat this side effect. The researchers looked at 596 patients who were treated for head and neck cancer…

Protein kinase R and dsRNAs, new regulators of mammalian cell division

This finding will provide important clues to understanding the process of tumor formation and the mechanism for suppressing cancer since the abnormal cell division marks the early events of cancer development. For the first time, the IBS research team has found that during mitosis, the cellular dsRNAs activate PKR, an enzyme previously known as a trigger of immune response during virus infection. Activated PKR then regulates protein synthesis and orchestrates mitotic processes…

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. …

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. …