Archive for the 'Cancer News' Category

Tobacco use caused 2.4 million cases of cancer in the United States from 1999 to 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

As might be expected, lung and bronchial cancer accounted for nearly half the cases but cancers of the larynx, mouth and pharynx, esophagus, stomach, pancreas, kidney, bladder, cervix, as well as acute myelogenous leukemia are also caused by tobacco, the CDC found.

“The data in this report provides additional, strong evidence of the serious harm related to tobacco,” said Sherri Stewart of the CDC’s Division of Cancer Prevention and Control, who led the study.

Stewart’s team looked at cancer surveys and registries covering 92 percent of the U.S. population.

Kentucky had the highest rates of lung cancer among men and women, while Western states with low rates of smoking also had low rates of cancer.

Tobacco-related cancers were more common among blacks, non-Hispanic whites and men, reflecting the groups that use tobacco more, the CDC found.

“Tobacco use is the leading preventable cause of disease and premature death in the United States and the most prominent cause of cancer,” said the CDC’s Dr. Matthew McKenna.

Read more at MSNBC

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.

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.

A new study links having strong bones to an elevated risk of breast cancer. At first blush, that seems to put women in a bind: tumor if you do, fracture if you don’t. The temptation to punch a wall in frustration is totally understandable.

But you certainly shouldn’t be misled by these results into believing that doing things to make your bones stronger—like lifting weights and taking calcium—will increase your breast cancer risk. The new finding doesn’t have any such sinister implication.

Sizing up breast cancer risk in women over 60 is tricky business. The standard risk model takes into account, among other things, age, race/ethnicity, and family history of breast cancer, yet it produces only a rough estimate of a woman’s risk.

The new study, published online today in the journal Cancer, found that hip bone density, which can be measured with an X-ray scan, is just as good a predictor.

What’s more, combining the density scan with the risk model could more accurately pinpoint risk for women already at heightened risk for breast cancer, like those who’ve previously had breast biopsies.

Scientists are claiming to have made a major breakthrough in the fight against prostate cancer with a new pill that shrinks tumors.

The new drug, abiraterone, could be used to treat up to 80 percent of patients with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, which almost always proves fatal.

The pill has been shown to minimize tumors and end the need for chemotherapy, which usually has unpleasant side effects and is not always effective.

Each year, 680,000 men worldwide are diagnosed with the disease and about 220,000 die from it.

In trials at the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden Hospital in Britain, the majority of patients with previously untreatable and advanced cancer are said to have experienced “significant” regression of the disease.

Abiraterone is now being tested on 1,200 men worldwide.

“This agent clearly looks promising, but it is still at the early stages of clinical development,” said David Webb, professor of clinical pharmacology at the University of Edinburgh.

Read more information at Fox News

California researchers say they have developed molecular “smart bombs” that stop pancreatic and kidney cancer from spreading in mice while causing fewer side effects and damage to healthy surrounding tissues than traditional chemotherapy.

A team from the University of California, San Diego, designed a “nanoparticle” anti-cancer drug delivery system that zooms in on a protein marker called integrin , which is found on the surface of certain tumor blood vessels. The marker is tied to the development of new blood vessels and malignant tumor growth.

While the system had little impact on primary tumors, it halted the metastasis of pancreatic and kidney cancers throughout the bodies of mice. Cancer metastasis normally is much harder to treat than the primary tumor, and it usually leads to the patient’s death.

According to the report, the system works with a lower dose of chemotherapy because it attacks the cancer with such precision. In most chemo treatments, the destruction of healthy tissue is a side effect as it floods the body with cancer-killing toxins.

“We were able to establish the desired anti-cancer effect while delivering the drug at levels 15 times below what is needed when the drug is used systemically,” study leader David Cheresh, vice chairman of pathology at UCSD, said in a university news release.

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.

A drug prescribed to combat brittle bones has been shown to prevent invasive breast cancer.

A study has found that raloxifene - a drug used to prevent and treat osteoporosis - reduces the risk of developing invasive breast cancers by more than 50%.

The drug works by binding to oestrogen receptors in the body, and by doing this it could be preventing some of the effects of oestrogen “that spur cancer growth”.

Previous research has suggested that raloxifene could potentially reduce the occurrence of oestrogen-receptor positive breast cancer, and this large study provides supportive evidence for this.

However, the actual role that the drug might play in the prevention of this type of breast cancer is uncertain.

It is necessary to point out that the women taking raloxifene were more likely to suffer blood clots and fatal strokes compared with those taking a placebo. To balance the benefits with any potential harms such as these, it is important to know the absolute number of people who would benefit from treatment.

For more information, visit: Medical News Today