Archive for August, 2009
If you or someone you love has been diagnosed with cancer, advocacy and support groups can help you navigate the medical jargon, therapy choices and emotional challenges of cancer survivorship. Many of these groups also advocate for patients by lobbying for federal research funding, raising awareness about early detection, and sharing the patient perspective with cancer researchers. …read the rest of this entry»
Besides all the links, which I immediately inserted into the text, I can recommend especially the following websites:
General information
www.krebs-kompass.org - Target operated since 1997 Cancer Compass site is to make the Internet available to cancer patients and their relatives as a source.
…read the rest of this entry»
LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have developed a computer programme to evaluate a woman’s individual risk of developing breast cancer.
Charity Cancer Research UK said the IBIS risk evaluator uses information about a woman’s family history of the disease to determine whether she has a genetic propensity to develop it.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Results of a study suggest that there are wide variations in the clinical management of women with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) in the U.S. Some women, it appears from the study, are overtreated with aggressive surgical therapy including mastectomy and axillary dissection, while others are undertreated, receiving no radiation after lumpectomy.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Leptin may partly explain the link between obesity and colon cancer, according to results of a study published in the March 10th issue of the International Journal of Cancer. No association was observed between hormone levels and rectal cancer risk.
“Obesity, a risk factor for colorectal cancer, is associated with elevated serum levels of leptin, the adipocyte-derived hormone, and insulin,” Dr. Par Stattin, of Umea University Hospital, Sweden, and colleagues write. “Experimental and epidemiological studies have indicated a role for insulin in the pathogenesis of colon cancer, and recent experimental studies have suggested a similar role for leptin.”
The researchers conducted a nested case-control study in which they measured serum levels of leptin and C-peptide in cryopreserved prediagnostic sera from men diagnosed with cancer of the colon (n = 235) or rectum (n = 143) after blood collection. They also studies sera from 378 controls matched for age and date of blood collection.
Conditional logistic regression analyses showed that the risk of colon cancer was increased approximately 3-fold with increasing concentrations of leptin. The odds ratio for high versus low quartile was 2.72. The corresponding ratio for C-peptide was 1.81, according to the authors.
“In conclusion, our results suggest that leptin may be an important link between obesity and colon cancer risk,” Dr. Stattin and colleagues explain. “Whether leptin is directly involved in colon tumorigenesis, or whether leptin is merely a sensitive and robust marker of other obesity-induced hormonal aberrations, remains to be elucidated.”
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The incidence of invasive squamous cell carcinoma of the cervix (SCC) continues to decline among U.S. women but the same cannot be said for invasive cervical adenocarcinoma, according to researchers in the cancer epidemiology and genetics branch of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.
Dr. Sophia S. Wang and colleagues used the U.S. Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database to calculate incidence rates for cervical carcinoma diagnosed between 1976 and 2000 by histologic subtype, race, age, and disease stage.
More than 27,000 invasive cervical carcinomas were diagnosed during that period, with 19,703 cases of SCC and 3,895 cases of adenocarcinoma.
They report in the March 1st issue of the journal Cancer that the “overall incidence of invasive SCC declined over time, and the majority of tumors that are detected currently are in situ and localized carcinomas in young women.”
The sharp increase in cases of SCC in situ noted in the early 1990s likely reflects a culmination of events including changes in nomenclature, improvements in treatment, and screening, the team reports.
Rates of adenocarcinoma in situ also increased during the study period, especially in young women, again due to better screening. However, this has not yet translated into a decrease in invasive adenocarcinoma incidence rates, according to Dr. Wang and colleagues. “There does not yet appear to be a screening effect for invasive adenocarcinoma,” they write, although “sufficient time may not have lapsed for an effect to be observed.”
Etiologic factors may explain the increasing incidence of invasive cervical adenocarcinoma in young white women, the investigators suggest, while in black women, the increase may reflect a “lack of effective screening or a differential disease etiology.”
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Ultraviolet-B (UVB) rays are the component of sunlight that cause sunburn, while ultraviolet-A (UVA) rays, which produce a tan, are thought to be relatively safe. Now, however, Australian and US researchers report that UVA induces a greater number of mutations in the deep layer of skin, where skin cancers arise, than does UVB light.
Far more UVA light than UVB light penetrates to the basal layers of skin, the scientists point out in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. However, UVA appears to cause less direct damage to DNA than UVB and has been “considered far less carcinogenic.”
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Numerous reports have shown that the outcomes for a particular surgery improve as the hospital volume and surgeon caseload for that procedure increases. This also appears to be true of resection of metastatic brain tumors.
The findings, which are reported in the March 1st issue of Cancer, are based on a study of nearly 14,000 operations that were performed in the US between 1988 and 2000.
Although cancer strikes both young and old, it is primarily a disease of aging. In the United States, 50 percent of all malignancies and 67 percent of cancer deaths occur in persons over the age of sixty-five. (That’s currently one American in eight; by the year 2030, it’s expected to be one in five.) Yet, even though they are ten times more likely than younger persons to develop cancer, the elderly are not screened as often; they are referred less frequently to major cancer centers where they have a better chance of being cured; and they are usually treated less aggressively for their disease. …read the rest of this entry»
