Tag Archives: program

Value, limitations of patient assistance programs for women with breast cancer

Most breast cancer patients who had information about patient assistance programs used them to learn more about adjuvant therapy, obtain psychosocial support, and overcome practical/financial obstacles to getting treatment, reported researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Researchers found that, in most cases, patients who were referred to assistance programs did contact organizations running programs, such as Cancer Care Inc., SHARE, and the Mount Sinai Breast Health Resources Program. …

New program makes prostate cancer treatment decisions easier

A recent clinical study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that mortality rates for early stage prostate cancer were the same for men who choose active surveillance such as periodic PSA testing and biopsy, versus those who chose to treat their disease immediately with radiation or surgery. The research suggested that in cases of low-risk prostate cancer, aggressive treatment may not offer a long term survival benefit, and yet is associated with a number of side effects such as urinary incontinence and sexual problems. However, the vast majority of men diagnosed with low-risk cancer undergo aggressive treatment rather than active surveillance…

‘Phenotype switching’ can make melanoma become metastatic, resistant to drugs

The findings were published in the journal Cancer Discovery and are currently available online. "We were able to demonstrate for the first time that different receptors within a single signaling pathway — in this case, the Wnt signaling pathway — can guide the phenotypic plasticity of tumor cells, and increased signaling of Wnt5A in particular can result in an increase in highly invasive tumor cells that are less sensitive to existing treatments for metastatic melanoma," said Ashani Weeraratna, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Tumor Microenvironment and Metastasis Program of Wistar’s NCI-designated Cancer Center, and senior corresponding author on the manuscript. …

Promise for treating papillary thyroid cancer

R. Dadu and colleagues from M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, will report on a series of patients with advanced metastatic PTC and the V600E BRAF mutation who were treated with the selective BRAF inhibitor vemurafenib in a poster presentation at the upcoming 83rd Annual Meeting of the American Thyroid Association, October 16-20, in San Juan, Puerto Rico…

Four genetic variants linked to esophageal cancer and its precursor, Barrett’s esophagus

The findings, by corresponding author Thomas L. Vaughan, M.D., M.P.H., a member of the Epidemiology Program in the Public Health Sciences Division at Fred Hutch, are published online ahead of the December print issue of Nature Genetics. Vaughan co-led the project with co-author David Whiteman, Ph.D., head of the Cancer Control Group at QIMR (formerly known as the Queensland Institute for Medical Research). …

Bone growth factor may increase benign tumors but not malignant cancer

Other papers in the September Neurosurgery report on a stent-assisted approach for difficult-to-treat brain aneurysms and a new software program to help in identifying and protecting critical areas during brain tumor surgery. BMP Linked to Increased Risk of Benign Tumors Dr. Nandan Lad of Duke University Medical Center and colleagues analyzed the risk of cancers and benign tumors in nearly 4,700 patients receiving BMP as part of spinal fusion surgery. …

Scientists analyze genetic makeup of human and mouse embryos in amazing detail

The technique could lead to earlier and more accurate diagnoses of genetic diseases, even when the embryo consists of only eight cells. The study was led by Guoping Fan, professor of human genetics and molecular biology and member of both the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research. The findings were published in the online edition of the journal Nature and will appear later in the print edition…

Higher cancer incidences found in regions near refineries and plants that release benzene

Non-Hodgkin lymphoma has been on the rise over the past few decades as industrial production in the United States has expanded. Benzene is one chemical carcinogen linked to blood cancers. Working with Dr. Christopher Flowers and colleagues in the Lymphoma Program at Emory University in Atlanta, Catherine Bulka, MPH, used publicly available data from the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Census Bureau to analyse the geographic patterns of non-Hodgkin lymphoma cases in the state of Georgia between 1999 and 2008…