Archive for July, 2008

Do you know what can increase your risk of stomach cancer? No one knows the exact cause of stomach cancer. But, many doctors believe that people who consume more amounts of smoked, salted or pickled foods are at increased risk of developing stomach cancer.

Is it possible to avoid advanced stages of stomach cancer?

Stomach cancer can be instantly treated, if you identify it in early stages. So, here are certain manifestations that are involved with stomach cancer. So, if you succeed in identifying these symptoms, then it becomes very easy for you to treat this cancer.

1. One early sign of cancer is microscopic internal bleeding, which is normally detected by the test that verifies your stool for the presence of blood in it.
2. Whenever this loss of blood in your stool mainly involves too many healthy red blood cells of your body, you can feel tired frequently or usually suffer with anemia.
3. In early stages of stomach cancer, you can also experience abdominal pain and heart burn, which is usually mistaken as other common health condition.

So, try to be more cautious about it and identify the early signs of this kind of cancer to avoid further complications associated with it.

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators have shown that an MGH-developed, microchip-based device that detects and analyzes tumor cells in the bloodstream can be used to determine the genetic signature of lung tumors, allowing identification of those appropriate for targeted treatment and monitoring genetic changes that occur during therapy.

CTCs or circulating tumor cells are living solid-tumor cells found at extremely low levels in the bloodstream.

“The study of the CTC-chip device opens up a whole new field of studying tumors in real time,” says Daniel Haber, MD, director of the MGH Cancer Center and the study’s senior author.

“When the device is ready for larger clinical trials, it should give us new options for measuring treatment response, defining prognostic and predictive measures, and studying the biology of blood-borne metastasis, which is the primary method by which cancer spreads and becomes lethal.”

The current study was designed to find whether the device could go beyond detecting CTCs to helping analyze the genetic mutations that can make a tumor sensitive to treatment with targeted therapy drugs.

The researchers tested blood samples from patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the leading cause of cancer death in the U.S.

Whenever your skin is exposed to harmful rays of sun, it can cause the most irritating skin cancer. The early signs of skin cancer can primarily change the texture of your skin that mainly results in growth or irritation on your skin.

Where do the signs of skin cancer primarily appear?

Apart from the sun exposed parts of your skin, the signs of skin cancer also develop on or surrounding areas of non-cancerous skin growth that are damaged due to any other reason.

But, more often, skin cancer primarily develops on certain specific parts of body including scalp, lips, ears, chest, neck, arms, and hands and also on legs of your body.

Very rarely, you can notice the signs of skin cancer at certain areas of your body that are rarely exposed to harmful rays of sun. These areas can mainly include palms, spaces between your toes and also at the genital areas of your body.

Do you think any change in your skin texture as a sign of skin cancer?

Not all the changes in your skin are considered as a sign of skin cancer. Most of the moles and other abnormal growths on your skin doesn’t cause any harm for your health and do not need to be removed. Only certain moles that look unattractive or which causes persistent irritation by clothing can be considered as a sign of cancer.

Surgeons are increasingly offering an added benefit to their breast-cancer patients: removing the tumor and cosmetically repairing the breast at the same time.

Women with breast cancer traditionally would see a cancer surgeon to have the diseased tissue removed and later see a plastic surgeon for reconstruction.

Now, more cancer surgeons are getting trained in cosmetic techniques that preserve or restore a breast’s shape or appearance. This emerging field of “oncoplastic surgery” could allow a patient to minimize the number of times she must go under the knife.

The shift comes as traditional plastic surgeons turn increasingly to purely cosmetic procedures, which pay more. Indeed, the number of breast-reconstruction surgeries declined 29% to 57,100 last year from 2000, a development the American Society of Plastic Surgeons attributes in part to poor insurance reimbursement for these procedures.

Breast cancer strikes one out of eight American women at some time in their lives. Making plans for breast reconstruction at the same time as cancer surgery can speed a woman on the path of psychological, as well as physical, recovery. And by combining procedures to reduce the number of operations, it also reduces the risk of complications from successive surgeries.