New research based on data from 21 centers shows that many more women approached their GPs with concerns. Far from these being women with unfounded concerns, it was women with a family history of breast cancer, which translated into appropriate referrals for testing. This research was funded by Breast Cancer Campaign…
Their work, performed in a mouse model of melanoma, found that combining exercise with chemotherapy shrunk tumors more than chemotherapy alone. Joseph Libonati, an associate professor in the School of Nursing and director of the Laboratory of Innovative and Translational Nursing Research, was the senior author on the study, which appears in the American Journal of Physiology. His collaborators included Penn Nursing’s Geetha Muthukumaran, Dennis Ding and Akinyemi Bajulaiye plus Kathleen Sturgeon, Keri Schadler, Nicholas J. …
Researchers from Boston University’s Slone Epidemiology Center (SEC) collaborated with the Roswell Park Cancer Institute of Buffalo, NY and the University of North Carolina Lineberger Cancer Center to form a consortium to study the determinants of breast cancer subtypes in African American women. They combined data on breast cancer cases and controls from four large studies, including the Boston University Black Women’s Health Study…
“There is this group of people who think they don’t need to worry about getting cancer and believe they don’t have a high family risk of getting cancer, but unfortunately do,” said Mahon, a professor in internal medicine at Saint Louis University. Mahon says her requests for genetic testing for breast cancer have more than tripled since 2013, when actress Angelina Jolie announced she had a double mastectomy because she was at genetic risk of developing breast cancer. Older genetic screenings were for the BRCA 1 and 2 genes, which are linked to the development of breast, ovarian, prostate, melanoma, pancreatic and other cancers…
“This study shows that a single receptor may play various roles depending on whether its site of action is in the nucleus or on the cell membrane,” states Dr. Jean-S�bastien Joyal, MD, PhD, a pediatric intensivist at the Sainte-Justine UHC and an assistant professor at the Universit� de Montr�al. The groundbreaking discovery has significant clinical implications, since many drugs act on this family of receptors irrespective of their site of action in the cell. “Our results are extremely encouraging. …
The cancer-fighting cocktail, which combines the chemotherapy drug cisplatin with pemetrexed — an agent that stops cancer cells from dividing — showed promising results for advanced, persistent, or recurrent cervical cancer. “We found that pemetrexed combined with cisplatin is less toxic, well tolerated, and should be developed for further treatment of cervical cancer,” said gynecologic oncology specialist Dr. …
A study of nearly 4000 Taiwanese, led by Emeritus Professor Mark Wahlqvist from Monash University’s Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine and the Monash Asia Institute, considered the role increased consumption of dairy foods had played in the country’s gains in health and longevity. “In a dominantly Chinese food culture, unaccustomed to dairy foods, consuming them up to seven times � a week does not increase mortality and may have favourable effects on stroke,” Professor Wahlqvist said. Cancer and cardiovascular disease are the leading causes of death among Taiwanese. When Professor Wahlqvist’s study began in 1993, there was little apparent concern about dairy foods, in contrast to a current belief that they may be harmful to health and in particular raise the risk of cancer…
Now for the first time, a new study published in the September 2014 Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI) and led by Brian Sprague, Ph.D., a University of Vermont assistant professor of surgery and member of the Vermont Cancer Center, estimates the number of women in the United States for whom breast density notification legislation would potentially impact. The study was conducted with the National Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium and utilizes data from breast cancer screening registries based at the University of Vermont, the Group Health Research Institute (Seattle, WA), the University of North Carolina, Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, the University of California-San Francisco, and the University of New Mexico. Given their findings, Sprague and his research team are asking policy makers to consider the large number of women who fall into the category of having mammographically-dense breasts in the U.S…
Researchers evaluated clinical features and survival outcomes among 41,502 patients diagnosed with stage I and II Hodgkin’s Disease from 1998 to 2011 from a prospectively collected database — the National Cancer Data Base (NCDB), which is composed of cases from 1,500 sites and represents >75 percent of all cancers diagnosed in the U.S. The average patient age was 37 (range: 18 — 90), with a median follow-up of 7.5 years. The association between RT use, co-variables and outcome were assessed in a multivariate Cox proportional hazards model…
“Waiting until the final days of life to begin hospice can shortchange patients and their families — skipping over many benefits of hospice care and limiting the opportunity to improve patients’ quality of life during this stressful time,” said study co-author David Casarett, MD, a professor of Medicine and director of Hospice and Palliative care at Penn Medicine. “Our findings point to some reasons why patients may seek hospice care so late in the course of their illness, which we hope will enable us to improve transitions to hospice at a more beneficial point in their care.” The team examined de-identified data from electronic medical records of 64,264 patients in 12 hospices in the Coalition of Hospices Organized to Investigate Comparative Effectiveness network from January 2008 to May 2013. …