Archive for August, 2008

Hormone therapy, the most common treatment for advanced prostate cancer, can boomerang to make the cancer more deadly, mouse studies suggest.

The finding “may revolutionize the way we combat prostate cancer,” suggest University of Rochester researchers Chawnshang Chang, PhD, Edward M. Messing, MD, and colleagues.

It’s well known that male sex hormones promote the growth of prostate cancer. That’s why doctors use hormone therapy — chemical or physical castration — to shut off these tumor-promoting androgens.

But Chang’s team finds that in different types of prostate cancer cells, androgens actually inhibit prostate cancer. When these tumor cells don’t get androgens, they become more aggressive and more invasive.

The lining of the prostate is made up of epithelial cells. The fibrous body of the prostate is made up of stromal cells.

On their surfaces, both cell types have triggers — androgen receptors — that fire when they encounter sex hormones. Triggering androgen receptors has different effects in each cell type.

Read more at WebMD

Early recognition and treatment of alcohol withdrawal syndrome can improve the outcomes of patients with head and neck cancer, researchers report in the Archives of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery.

The alcohol withdrawal syndrome includes several symptoms seen in persons who stop drinking alcohol after continuous and heavy use. Milder forms of the syndrome include seizures, tremulousness, and hallucinations, usually occurring within 6 to 48 hours after the last drink.

“Alcohol withdrawal syndrome in the postoperative, post-traumatic and other inpatient settings is a potentially life-threatening condition that is difficult to identify in its early stages and difficult to treat in its later stages,” senior investigator Dr. Theodoros N. Teknos told.

“In this study,” he added, “we employed a standardized treatment protocol which identified at-risk patients early and began treatment at the first signs of alcohol withdrawal syndrome.”

Teknos of the University of Michigan Health System, Ann Arbor, and colleagues screened postoperative patients, initially using an alcohol consumption questionnaire, and identified 26 at risk for alcohol withdrawal syndrome.

Two of the selected patients showed no signs of alcohol withdrawal syndrome and three who did not meet alcohol withdrawal syndrome criteria were enrolled late after they began to develop symptoms.

Do you have fibrocystic breast condition? Is it true that fibrocystic breast disease increases the risk of breast cancer? Most of you might be in a wrong thought that fibrocystic breast condition can increase your breast cancer risk.

But, this condition of lumpy breast doesn’t increase your risk of breast cancer. So, if you really want to confirm it, try to know more about fibrocystic breast condition that is absolutely non-cancerous.

Fibrocystic breast disease is one of the most common breast conditions that take place in women. If you have fibrocystic breast disease, you will suffer with painful lumpy breasts.

If you are a premenopausal woman, then you must be very careful, since it is believed that this condition of fibrocystic breasts primarily affects women between the ages of 30 and 50 years and usually tends to cause very less problems after they reach menopause.

Estrogen and progesterone plays a vital role!

Menstrual cycle is the most significant factor, which mainly contributes to fibrocystic breast condition. During your normal menstrual cycle, many hormonal changes take place in your body.

Estrogen and progesterone are the two hormones that directly affect your breast tissues and leads to abnormal cell growth.

Feelings of happiness and optimism play a positive role against breast cancer.

Research published in the open access journal BMC Cancer suggests that while staying positive has a protective role, adverse life events such as the loss of a parent or close relative, divorce or the loss of a spouse can increase a woman’s risk of developing the disease.

Ronit Peled from the Faculty of Health Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, led a team of researchers who questioned 255 women with breast cancer and 367 healthy controls about their life experiences and evaluated their levels of happiness, optimism, anxiety and depression prior to diagnosis.

Peled said, “Young women who have been exposed to a number of negative life events should be considered an ‘at-risk’ group for breast cancer and should be treated accordingly”.

The researchers do point out that women were interviewed after their diagnosis, which may color their recall of their past emotional state somewhat negatively.

However, according to Peled, “We can carefully say that experiencing more than one severe and/or mild to moderate life event is a risk factor for breast cancer among young women. On the other hand, a general feeling of happiness and optimism can play a protective role”.

British scientists say a simple bowel cancer test could save thousands of lives by spotting the deadliest tumors.

They say patients who are most likely to develop a more virulent strain of the disease could be identified by a test which looks for a marker stem cell protein called Lamin A.

Lamin A pinpoints aggressive bowel cancers which need the most treatment and the researchers from Durham University have developed a test which looks for the marker in order to identify which patients need be given chemotherapy in addition to standard surgery to improve survival.

The team now aims to develop a Lamin A-based detection test for use in the health service which could be on the market in five years.

Bowel cancer is one of the most common cancer and causes 677,000 deaths worldwide each year; almost three quarters of cases occur in people aged 65 and over and it is slightly more common in women than men.

In this age group chemotherapy is often not used as it could cause more harm than benefit in patients who are elderly and frail but for the most aggressive cancers, chemotherapy can be beneficial.

Many of you with cervical cancer certainly want to know about various treatment options available for treating cervical cancer. However, shock and stress that you experience after the diagnosis of your disease can make it hard for you to think about treatment options and asking certain questions to your doctor regarding cervical cancer.

So, never be depressed about your cervical cancer. Don’t be in the misconception that you are the only one suffering with cervical cancer. It has been estimated that almost 11,000 women in total population are diagnosed with cervical cancer. So, be bold and try to explore different treatment options available for your cervical cancer.

Cervical cancer treatment mainly depends on the presence of growth of cancerous cells on your cervix. Here are certain recommended treatment options used in treating both invasive and non-invasive cervical cancer.

Treatment options for non-invasive cervical cancer!

If the presence of cancerous cells is particularly confined to outer layers of your cervix, it typically requires removing the abnormal cell growths. When you have this kind of non-invasive cervical cancer, these are certain procedures suggested to remove the cancerous growths on your cervix.

Precisely targeted radiation therapy can eradicate tumors that have spread to other parts of the body, offering more months or years of life to patients who have no other options, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

They said new radiation techniques can attack metastases — tumors that have spread — one by one.

Experiments in 29 patients showed the radiation stopped all the tumors in six, or 21 percent, of the patients, for anywhere between 10 months and more than two years.

“This was proof of principle in patients who had failed the standard therapies and had few, if any, remaining options,” said Dr. Ralph Weichselbaum of the University of Chicago Medical Center, who led the study.

Treatment doesn’t always work
But the results were inconsistent — in another six patients, only the treated tumors grew, while in yet another six, untreated tumors remained and grew, the team at the University of Chicago Medical Center reported in the journal Clinical Cancer Research.

In eight of the patients, new tumors appeared but the treated tumors were stopped.

Read more at MSNBC

A combination of chemotherapy agents that have been tested in other tumor types appears to be a promising alternative to standard treatment for advanced non-small cell lung cancer, according to a report.

In a phase II multicenter study of 56 patients with an advanced form of this common lung cancer, endpoints including response rate, progression-free survival, and overall survival from use of S-1 and irinotecan were similar to, or better than, those reported from standard treatment with platinum-based chemotherapy regimens.

Because the study had only a single arm – meaning all patients received the experimental therapy – the researchers cannot say if this regimen offers more benefit than standard treatment.

But they did report that side effects resulting from the experimental therapy appeared to be much less severe than those typically seen with standard treatment.

“There continues to be reluctance on the part of both patients and treating physicians to accept the toxicity of platinum-based therapy, given the associated small gain in survival, so active therapies with improved toxicity profiles are clearly needed,” said the study’s lead investigator, Isamu Okamoto, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Medical Oncology.

Read more at EurekAlert