Cancer
Elevated biomarkers predict risk for prostate cancer recurrence
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A simple blood test screening for a panel of biomarkers can accurately predict whether a patient who has had prostate cancer surgery will have a recurrence or spread of the disease.
Calling their findings a major step forward in prostate cancer care, Texas researchers report in the June 15 issue of Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, that the presence of seven of these biomarkers can predict prostate cancer risk with 86.6 percent reliability. This is at least 15 percentage points higher than standard clinical measures currently in use, the researchers say.
“We have been looking at these biomarkers for the past 10 to 15 years in the laboratory, but now we can translate these findings into progress for the individual patient,” said Shahrokh F. Shariat, M.D., chief resident in urology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
Pregnancy may help protect against bladder cancer
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Pregnancy seems to confer some protection against bladder cancer in mice, scientists have found.
Female mice that had never become pregnant had approximately 15 times as much cancer in their bladders as their counterparts that had become pregnant, according to new findings by investigators at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Their work appears online as a rapid communication in the journal Urology.
The researchers led by Jay Reeder, Ph.D., are focusing on a fact that has puzzled doctors and scientists for decades: Why does bladder cancer, the fifth most common malignancy in the nation, affect about three times as many men as women? Scientists long blamed men’s historically higher rates of smoking and greater exposure to dangers in the workplace, but the gap has persisted even as women swelled the workforce and took up smoking in greater numbers.
Vitamin D helps colorectal cancer patients: study
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Vitamin D may extend the lives of people with colon and rectal cancer, according to a study published on Wednesday, suggesting another health benefit from the so-called sunshine vitamin.
Previous research has indicated that people with higher levels of vitamin D may be less likely to develop colon and rectal cancer, also called colorectal cancer.
The new study led by Dr. Kimmie Ng of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston involved 304 men and women diagnosed with colorectal cancer from 1991 to 2002, to see if higher levels of vitamin D in the patients affected their survival chances.
Healthy lifestyle triggers genetic changes: study
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Comprehensive lifestyle changes, including a better diet and more exercise, can lead not only to a better physique but also to swift and dramatic changes at the genetic level, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
In a small study, the researchers tracked 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer who decided against conventional medical treatment such as surgery and radiation or hormone therapy.
The men underwent three months of major lifestyle changes, including eating a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and soy products, moderate exercise such as walking for half an hour a day, and an hour of daily stress management methods such as meditation.
Only 1 in 5 women in developing world receive effective cervical cancer screening
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Few women in the developing world are screened effectively for cervical cancer and those at highest risk of developing the disease are among the least likely to be screened, accordingly an analysis published in PLoS Medicine. The study, by Emmanuela Gakidou (University of Washington, Seattle, USA) and colleagues, also finds striking inequalities in access to cervical cancer screening between and within countries.
Cervical cancer is the second-most common cancer in women and a leading cause of death worldwide. Since the 1970s, the developed world has seen a fall in the annual number of new cases of cervical cancer, and a fall in the death rate from the disease. This public health success is often credited to widespread screening programmes. But in the developing world, where most cervical cancer occurs, there is little information about rates of screening.
To address this lack of information and to estimate the magnitude of inequalities in access to screening services, Gakidou and colleagues analyzed World Health Organization surveys from 57 countries across all levels of economic development.
Ability to track stem cells in tumors could advance cancer treatments
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Using noninvasive molecular imaging technology, a method has been developed to track the location and activity of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in the tumors of living organisms, according to researchers at SNM’s 55th Annual Meeting. This ability could lead to major advances in the use of stem cell therapies to treat cancer.
“Stem cell cancer therapies are still in the early stages of development, but they offer great promise in delivering personalized medicine that will fight disease at the cellular level,” said Hui Wang, a postdoctoral fellow from Prof. Xiaoyuan (Shawn) Chen’s group of the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford (MIPS), Department of Radiology at Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., and lead researcher of the study, Trafficking the Fate of Mesenchymal Stem Cells In Vivo. “Our results indicate that molecular imaging can play a critical role in understanding and improving the process of how stem cells migrate to cancer cells. Eventually, this technique could also be used to determine if gene-modified stem cells are effective in fighting cancer.”
MSCs are adult stem cells that have the ability to transform into many different types of cells, such as bone, fat or cartilage. Many scientists believe that stem cells show great promise in treating different types of diseases—and a few stem cell therapies are already used to fight some types of cancer.
Lung cancer no more common in women smokers: study
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Women who smoke are no more likely than men to get lung cancer but, among non-smokers, women appear to have a higher risk than men, U.S. researchers reported on Friday.
Women who had never smoked were 1.3 times more likely to develop lung cancer than men who had never smoked, Dr. Neal Freedman of the National Cancer Institute and colleagues found.
“We noted slightly higher age-standardized incidence rates of lung cancer in women who had never smoked than in men who had never smoked,” Freedman and colleagues wrote in the journal Lancet Oncology.
Study details heart problems after childhood cancer
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Survivors of childhood cancer who had aggressive chemotherapy are at increased risk of structural and functional heart problems, a new study indicates.
Both chemotherapy, especially with drugs called anthracyclines, and radiation to the chest are known to increase the risk of heart damage among childhood cancer survivors, Dr. Veronika Velensek of the University Children’s Hospital Ljubljana in Slovenia and colleagues note.
To better understand the risk factors for cardiovascular disease among these patients, Velensek and her team performed a battery of tests of heart structure and function in 211 patients who had survived for at least five years after being diagnosed with cancer in childhood. All were treated between 1968 and 1998.
Synthetic molecules hold promise for new family of anti-cancer drugs
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Jerusalem, June 4, 2008—Synthetic molecules designed by two Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers have succeeded in reducing and even eliminating the growth of human malignant tissues in mice, while having no toxic effects on normal tissue.
For their work in developing these harbingers of a possible new generation of anti-cancer drugs, Dr. Arie Dagan and Prof. Shimon Gatt of the Department of Biochemistry of the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School were among those receiving the Kaye Award for Innovation today during the 71st meeting of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Board of Governors.
The molecules developed by Dagan and Gatt affected the metabolism of various sphingolipids and consequently those of cancer cells. Sphingolipids are a family of complex lipid molecules that are involved in signaling pathways that mediate cell growth, differentiation and death.
Blood test may detect lung cancer in early stages
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A simple blood test may be able to detect lung cancer in its early stages, which would represent a promising strategy to improve survival rates, researchers said on Sunday.
Lung cancer survival rates are poor, mainly because the disease, which kills 1.3 million people globally a year, is often diagnosed in advanced stages.
Canadian film festival to highlight breast cancer
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Toronto will host a movie event billed as the world’s first-ever film festival dedicated to breast cancer awareness, a Canadian charity said.
Breast Fest will showcase feature-length and short films, documentaries, animation, and experimental works that highlight breast cancer, an illness that afflicts more than 1 million women worldwide each year.
“We want this to be international and we want people to be able to share their experiences with breast cancer from their perspective from within their country and their unique experience,” MJ DeCoteau, the executive director of the charity Rethink Breast Cancer which is organizing the event, said in an interview.
Exercise cuts cancer death in men
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Men who exercise often are less likely to die from cancer than those who don’t exercise, according to a new study from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet. In the study, the researchers looked at the effect of physical activity and cancer risk in 40,708 men aged between 45 and 79.
Over the seven year period of the study, published in the British Journal of Cancer, 3,714 men developed cancer and 1,153 died from the disease. Men who walked or cycled for at least 30 minutes a day had an increased survival from cancer with 33 per cent, than the men who exercised less or did nothing at all. The researchers also found that a more extensive programme of walking and cycling for between 60 and 90 minutes and a day, led to a l6 per cent lower incidence of cancer. But these activities only led to a five per cent reduction in cancer rates among the men who walked or cycled for 30 minutes day, a finding which could be due to chance.
The researchers surveyed men from two counties in central Sweden about their lifestyle and the amount of physical activity they did. They then scored these responses and compared the results with data officially recorded in a central cancer registry over a seven year period.
Dehydrated Tomatoes Show Promise for Preventing Prostate Cancer
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New research suggests that the form of tomato product one eats could be the key to unlocking its prostate cancer-fighting potential, according to a report in the June 1 issue of Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.
“Processing of many edible plants through heating, grinding, mixing or drying dramatically increases their nutrition value, including their cancer prevention potential. It appears that the greatest protective effect from tomatoes comes by rehydrating tomato powder into tomato paste,” said Valeri V. Mossine, Ph.D., research assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Missouri.
The protective effect of tomato products against prostate cancer has been suggested in many studies, but researchers remain uncertain about the exact mechanisms. Mossine and colleagues demonstrated that FruHis, an organic carbohydrate present in dehydrated tomato products, exerts a strong protective effect.
Swayze ‘responding well’ to cancer treatment
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Former “Dirty Dancing” star Patrick Swayze is responding well to treatment for pancreatic cancer, he told People magazine.
Swayze, 55, who announced in March that he had been diagnosed with cancer, is receiving treatment at Stanford University Medical Center near San Francisco.
Estrogen Helps Drive Distinct, Aggressive Form of Prostate Cancer
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Using a breakthrough technology, researchers led by a Weill Cornell Medical College scientist have pinpointed the hormone estrogen as a key player in about half of all prostate cancers.
Estrogen-linked signaling helps drive a discrete and aggressive form of the disease caused by a chromosomal translocation, which in turn results in the fusion of two genes.
“Fifty percent of prostate cancers harbor a common recurrent gene fusion, and we believe that this confers a more aggressive nature to these tumors,” explains study senior author Dr. Mark A. Rubin, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, and vice chair for experimental pathology at Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Rubin is also attending pathologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
