Cancer
Exercise may lead to faster prostate tumor growth
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Prostate tumors grew more quickly in mice who exercised than in those who did not, leading to speculation that exercise may increase blood flow to tumors, according to a new study by researchers in the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center (DCCC) and the Duke Prostate Center.
“Our study showed that exercise led to significantly greater tumor growth than a more sedentary lifestyle did, in this mouse model,” said Lee Jones, Ph.D., a researcher in the DCCC and senior investigator on this study. “Our thought is that we may, in the future, be able to use this finding to design better drug delivery models to more effectively treat prostate cancer patients, and those with other types of cancer as well.”
The findings were presented in a poster session at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting on April 13 in San Diego, Calif. The study was funded by the United States Department of Defense, the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the American Urological Association Foundation, Rising Star in Urology Award, given to Stephen Freedland, one of the study’s investigators.
Soy compound linked to lower breast cancer risk
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Women with high blood levels of an estrogen-like compound found in soy seem to have a lower risk of developing breast cancer, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that among more than 24,000 middle-aged and older Japanese women, those with the highest levels of the compound, called genistein, were only one-third as likely as other women to develop breast cancer over 10 years.
Genistein is one of the major isoflavones, plant compounds found in soybeans, chick peas and other legumes that are structurally similar to the hormone estrogen, and are believed to bind to estrogen receptors on body cells.
Newly Diagnosed Breast Cancer Patients Benefit
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Newly Diagnosed Breast Cancer Patients Benefit from Use of Ultrasound-guided Fine Needle Aspiration of Lymph Nodes
Ultrasound-guided fine needle aspiration (USFNA) of the lymph nodes is a safe, useful, and minimally invasive procedure for diagnosing metastatic disease in patients who are undergoing preoperative staging for breast cancer, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at the Rhode Island Hospital/Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence, RI.
“We wanted to determine which patients with newly diagnosed breast cancer would benefit most from preoperative fine needle aspiration of the axillary lymph nodes,” said Martha Mainiero, MD, lead author of the study. “This quick and minimally invasive procedure can assist the surgeon in determining what type of axillary surgery is best for patients with breast cancer. Unfortunately many centers do not routinely perform this procedure as there is not yet consensus on who will benefit from it,” she said.
Inhaled insulin linked to lung cancer: Pfizer
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Clinical trials of the inhaled insulin product Exubera revealed an increase in the number of lung cancer patient, leading Nektar Therapeutics to end talks with potential partners to market the product, Pfizer Inc and Nektar said on Wednesday
Over the course of the clinical trials, Pfizer said 6 of the 4,740 Exubera-treated patients versus 1 of the 4,292 patients not treated with Exubera developed lung cancer. One lung cancer case was also found after Exubera reached the market.
Pfizer updated the Exubera labeling to include a warning with safety information about lung cancer cases found in patients who used Exubera, which U.S. regulators approved in January 2006.
Cancer widows are often emotionally isolated
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Many Swedish men have no one to turn to for emotional support other than their partners, not even in particularly traumatic situations, such as when suffering from cancer. However, according to new research, the partners of cancer patients also often lack support outside the relationship.
Previous research has shown that many Swedish men over 50 with cancer confide their feelings and fears about the disease to few other people, if any. For 80 per cent of men who have prostate cancer and who live together with someone else, the partner is the only source of emotional support they have. Seventy per cent of single men with prostate cancer do not share their feelings with another person.
The same group of researchers at Karolinska Institutet has now examined the extent to which women in the same age group who have lost their husbands to cancer confide in other people. Their results show that one third of these women have nobody else with whom to share their feelings.
Frequent blood donation doesn’t boost cancer risk
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Frequent blood donation is not harmful to your health, a new study confirms.
“No one should worry that giving blood causes cancer,” Dr. Gustaf Edgren of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, the study’s lead author, told Reuters Health. “If anything, blood donation may actually be good for you.”
People who donate blood show lower cancer and mortality rates than their non-donating peers, Edgren and his colleagues note in their report, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Association, but the fact that blood donors tend to be healthier overall could mask any ill effects of frequent donation.
Increase in throat cancer parallels obesity rate
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The rising incidence of throat cancer, also referred to as cancer of the esophagus or esophageal adenocarcinoma, may be related to Americans’ increasing intake of total and refined carbohydrates and subsequent rise in obesity rates.
“The similarity in these trends gives further evidence for the association of carbohydrate intake, obesity, and related measures with cancer,” Dr. Cheryl L. Thompson told Reuters Health.
She and colleagues caution, however, that such observations do not necessarily reflect individual risk for esophageal adenocarcinoma
Scientists smoke out genes behind lung cancer
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Scientists have found important genetic differences between people that may help explain why some smokers get lung cancer and others do not.
Three teams from France, Iceland and the United States said on Wednesday they had pinpointed a region of the genome containing genes that can put smokers at even greater risk of contracting the killer disease.
In all three studies, nicotine appears a major culprit.
Anemia increases risk of breast cancer recurrence
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Women with breast cancer who developed anemia during chemotherapy had nearly three times the risk of local recurrence as those who did not develop anemia, according to a study published this week.
“We speculate that there may be an interaction between chemotherapy/radiotherapy and anemia,” study chief Dr. Peter Dubsky, from the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, said in a statement.
“Both treatment modalities have been shown to be less effective in anemia patients. Since we do not see the effect in terms of relapse-free survival, the interaction with local adjuvant treatment may play a more important role,” Dubsky added.
Integrating Genetic Information With Breast Cancer Risks May Refine Prognosis
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Incorporating genetic information known as gene expression signatures with clinical and other risk factors for breast cancer may help refine estimates of relapse-free survival and predicted response to chemotherapy, according to a study in the April 2 issue of JAMA.
“The advent of genomic technology for the analysis of human tumor samples has now added an additional source of information to aid prognosis and clinical decisions. In particular, the development of genomic profiles that accurately assess risk of recurrence offers the hope that this information will more precisely define clinical outcomes in breast cancer. The dimension and complexity of such data provide an opportunity to uncover clinically valid trends that can distinguish subtle phenotypes [physical manifestations] in ways that traditional methods cannot,” the authors write. Few studies have examined the value in integrating genomic information with the traditional clinical risk factors to provide a more detailed assessment of clinical risk and an improved prediction of response to therapy.
Chaitanya R. Acharya, M.S., of the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, Duke University, Durham, N.C., and colleagues conducted a study to determine the value in incorporating genomic information with clinical and pathological risk factors to refine prognosis and to improve therapeutic strategies for early stage breast cancer.
Potential association of type 2 diabetes genes with prostate cancer
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-Scientists have identified six new genes which play a role in the development of type 2 diabetes, and among the group is the second gene known to also play a role in prostate cancer.
The new findings bring the total number of genes or genomic regions implicated in diabetes to 16, said Laura Scott, assistant research scientist in the Department of Biostatistics. Researchers from the University of Michigan were one of three teams of scientists in Europe and North America that led the multi-group collaboration. The findings, which were published today in the journal Nature Genetics, provide new insights into the mechanisms which are usually responsible for the control of glucose, or sugar, levels in the blood, and to the derangements that can result in type 2 diabetes, which impacts more than 170 million people worldwide.
One of the newly discovered genes, which goes by the name of JAZF1, contains a separate variant that has recently been shown to play a role in prostate cancer, and is the second gene that appears to play a role in both conditions.
Obese women less likely to have cancer screenings
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Obese women, particularly white obese women, are less likely than their thinner peers to be screened for breast and cervical cancers, researchers reported Monday.
In a review of 32 previously published studies, researchers found that obesity was consistently linked to lower rates of breast and cervical cancer screening among white women. Fourteen studies focused on cervical cancer, 10 on breast cancer and 8 looked at colorectal cancer.
Sarah S. Cohen and colleagues at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, report the findings in the online edition of the journal Cancer.
Likelihood of Heart Attack Increases for Men After Prostate Cancer Diagnoses
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Emotional stress is associated with CV morbidity and mortality, such as reported during earthquakes, loss of a child and during world cup soccer matches. Emotional triggers result in physiological responses on the vascular, inflammatory and immune systems. These severe physiologic changes can then exacerbate existing comorbidities or initiate new ones.
Several Swedish registries were used for this analysis. A cohort study was designed for men older than 30 years. Four million men were identified. For the first year after CaP diagnosis, fatal CV events among men diagnosed with CaP was 15% higher than those without a CaP diagnosis and non-fatal CV events were 13% higher.
Ovarian cancer risk lower with longer time on Pill
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For each year that a woman takes an oral contraceptive, her risk of ovarian cancer is reduced by about 5 percent on average, report investigators from the University of Hawaii.
The reduction in ovarian cancer risk becomes apparent after a short time since first use (five years or less) and a short duration of use (one year), note Dr. Galina Lurie and colleagues.
Lurie, with the Cancer Research Center of Hawaii at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, and her colleagues identified these protective effects after studying data on 813 women with epithelial ovarian cancer and 992 women without ovarian cancer.
Survey gauges side effects of prostate treatments
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Age, race and obesity affect how satisfied men are with their treatment for prostate cancer, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.
And the effects of short-term hormone therapy can linger for years, the survey of 1,201 men treated at nine university hospitals and 625 of their partners found.
The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, are designed to give doctors and patients a better idea of what to expect from three types of prostate cancer treatment.
