Cancer
EU to take another look at GSK breast cancer drug
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Europe’s drugs regulators will take another look at GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s new breast cancer pill Tyverb after new data showed a small risk of higher liver enzymes during treatment with the drug.
GSK, Europe’s biggest drug maker, said on Tuesday that the European Commission had referred Tyverb, which is on sale in the United States under the name Tykerb, back to the EU’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP).
CHMP recommended conditional approval for Tyverb in December, meaning it could go on sale but that additional data were required.
Frank talk about family breast cancer risk urged
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Women from families who openly talk about their family history of breast cancer are more knowledgeable about genetic counseling and testing, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday. That may make them more likely to get tested, they said.
Researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center and George Washington University Hospital undertook the study to understand why black women participate less in genetic counseling and testing for breast cancer genes than do white women.
While they were unable to pinpoint key differences between the two groups, they did find that when a woman knows her family’s breast cancer history, she is better informed about the need for testing.
Overweight women have worse breast cancer: study
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Breast cancer patients who are overweight have more aggressive disease and are likely to die sooner, U.S. researchers reported on Friday.
A dangerous type of breast cancer, known as inflammatory breast cancer, was seen in 45 percent of obese patients, compared with 30 percent of overweight patients and 15 percent of patients of healthy weight.
“The more obese a patient is, the more aggressive the disease,” said Dr. Massimo Cristofanilli of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, who led the study.
Treatment Gives Lung Cancer Patients With Inoperable Tumors Two Years or More
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Radiofrequency ablation (RFA)—an interventional treatment that “cooks” and kills lung cancer tumors with heat—greatly improves survival time from primary or metastatic inoperable lung tumors, according to a study released today at the Society of Interventional Radiology’s 33rd Annual Scientific Meeting. Of the 244 patients suffering from lung metastases (195 patients) or primary non-small cell lung cancer (49 patients), 70 percent were still alive at two years, including 72 percent for lung metastases and 64 percent for primary lung cancer. These survival results are similar to surgical results from other studies, but the interventional treatment is less invasive and has far fewer side effects and less recovery time. The researchers found that RFA often can completely destroy the primary tumor and, therefore, extend a patient’s survival and greatly improve his or her quality of life. Survival thus becomes dependent on the extent of disease elsewhere in the body.
Of the 49 patients (ages 27–85) with non-small cell primary lung cancer who were treated with RFA, 85 percent had no viable lung tumors after one year on imaging, and 77 percent had no viable lung tumors after two years, which indicates a cure. This study was conducted in tumors four centimeters in diameter or smaller, and even better results were obtained for tumors smaller than two centimeters.
Testicular cancer gauge often not used
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A standard part of testicular cancer care isn’t used in more than half of all patients who have the condition, researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center have found.
Serum-based tumor markers, which are one indicator of the presence of cancer cells, are helpful in several aspects of the care of patients with testis cancer, including diagnosis, prognostication and surveillance for disease recurrence following treatment. Doctors typically rely on a series of three tumor markers with this type of cancer.
In a review of more than 4,700 testicular cancer cases, a combination of two of these tumor markers were used less than half of the time, while all three tumor markers were measured in just 16 percent of the cases.
Parkinson’s Disease Drug Might Work in Cancer Patients
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A study published in the March 13 online issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation shows that dopamine, a drug currently used to treat Parkinson’s disease and other illnesses, also might work in cancer patients. The study, which was done in mouse and laboratory models, shows that dopamine could possibly prevent new blood vessels from growing and as a result, slow cancer progression.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter in the brain that regulates movement and affects behavior. In its synthetic form, dopamine is used to treat heart attack victims, Parkinson’s disease and pituitary tumors. But it wasn’t known until now that dopamine worked by blocking the growth of new blood vessels (a process called angiogenesis).
“Researchers now can test this concept in solid tumors where angiogenesis plays a critical role in the growth and progression of these cancers,” says Sujit Basu, M.D., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic scientist who conducted this study with Partha Sarathi Dasgupta, Ph.D., a scientist with the Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute (CNCI) in Calcutta, India.; and, Debanjan Chakroborty, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in biochemistry at Mayo Clinic and CNCI.
Study Offers Clues About Patient Allergies to Cancer Drug
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Members of a study team led by Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills of the University of Virginia Health System knew they had a medical mystery on their hands. When treated with the widely-used cancer drug, cetuximab, patients in several states – mostly in the Southeast – were experiencing allergic reactions more frequently and more severely than those living elsewhere. Reactions typically occurred during initial treatment and sometimes included anaphylaxis, a life-threatening condition characterized by a rapid drop in blood pressure, fainting, difficulty breathing, and wheezing.
Previous research had shown that 22 percent of patients in Tennessee and North Carolina had severe allergic reactions to the drug. Even higher reaction rates and clusters of cases had been reported in Arkansas, Missouri and Virginia. This data contrasted sharply with the drug’s label, which states that three percent of patients experienced severe allergic reactions, and with results in the northeast, where less than one percent of patients receiving cetuximab had allergic reactions.
“There seemed to be a link between geographic location and allergic response, and we wanted to know why,” explains Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills, Professor of Medicine, Allergy and Clinical Immunology at UVA. The team’s findings, published in the March 13, 2008 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, offer a key clue to solving this mystery.
Diabetes linked to endometrial cancer risk
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Type 2 diabetes is associated with cancer of the lining of the uterus (endometrial cancer), regardless of the presence of most other risk factors, study findings suggest.
“A positive association has been observed in nearly all studies of type 2 diabetes in relation to the incidence of endometrial cancer,” Dr. Babette S. Saltzman, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, Washington, and colleagues note in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
“Given the adverse effect of obesity on the incidence of both diabetes and endometrial cancer, investigators have adjusted for obesity in a number of these studies,” they note. “To varying degrees, all found that diabetes was independently associated with endometrial cancer.”
Promising cancer drug may endanger child’s bones
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A compound that looked promising for treating a brain tumor found mostly in children may damage growing bone—possibly making it too dangerous to use in young patients, researchers reported on Monday.
The drug fully eradicated medulloblastoma tumors in mice in 2004. But further testing showed it caused permanent bone damage in immature mice, Tom Curran of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and colleagues found.
Writing in the journal Cancer Cell, they said the drug, known by its experimental name HhAntag, will need to be developed with caution.
Malignant tumor or benign cyst?
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The results of a study presented today at the Society of Gynecologic Oncology’s 39th Annual Meeting on Women’s Cancer offer a promising development on the path toward better management of ovarian cancer. Researchers say testing women suspected of having ovarian cancer for a combination of proteins, or biomarkers in the blood called HE4 and CA 125, could be the key to predicting a woman’s risk for the disease dubbed the “silent killer.” Currently there is no adequate diagnostic test for ovarian cancer.
“Roughly 20 percent of women will be diagnosed with an ovarian cyst or tumor at some point in their life, and only a small percentage of these women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer,” said Lead Researcher Richard Moore, M.D., assistant professor at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and a gynecologic oncologist in the Program in Women’s Oncology at Women & Infants’ Hospital of Rhode Island. “The problem is that current methods for distinguishing benign ovarian tumors from malignant ones are limited and as a result, women must undergo surgery without an accurate assessment as to their risk for having ovarian cancer prior to their surgery.”
“Dirty Dancing” star Patrick Swayze has cancer
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Actor and dancer Patrick Swayze, star of such hit films as “Dirty Dancing” and “Ghost,” has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer but is responding well to treatment, his publicist said on Wednesday.
The 55-year-old performer was working during his treatments, publicist Annett Wolf said, dismissing reports in the tabloid media that portrayed him in grave condition with only weeks to live.
Wolf issued a written statement from his physician, Dr. George Fisher that said: “Patrick has a very limited amount of disease and he appears to be responding well to treatment.”
Cancer pill could affect women’s fertility - report
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Long-term use of the cancer pill Gleevec may produce fertility problems in women, Greek doctors reported on Wednesday.
Chemotherapy and radiation have long been known to damage the fertility of patients, but little is known about more targeted drugs such as Gleevec, known generically as imatinib.
Dr. Constantinos Christopoulos of the Amalia Fleming General Hospital in Athens and colleagues reported on the case of a 30-year-old woman with chronic myeloid leukemia who stopped menstruating after two years of taking Gleevec, made by Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp.
New target for cancer therapy may improve treatment for solid tumors
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Targeting and killing the non-malignant cells that surround and support a cancer can stop tumor growth in mice, reports a research team based at the University of Chicago Medical Center in the March 1, 2008, issue of the journal Cancer Research. The discovery offers a new approach to treating cancers that are resistant to standard therapy.
Many solid tumors develop elaborate mechanisms to prevent recognition and elimination by the immune system. Due to their genetic instability they often discard the tumor antigen-presenting cell-surface structures that alert the immune system that these cells are harmful. Without these “flags,” the white blood cells fail to recognize and kill infected or cancerous cells. These tumors then often grow rapidly and resist treatment with chemotherapy or efforts to boost the immune system’s response to the tumor.
Study Details Link Between Obesity, Carbs and Esophageal Cancer
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Cases of esophageal cancer (adenocarcinoma) in the U.S. have risen in recent decades from 300,000 cases in 1973 to 2.1 million in 2001 at age-adjusted rates. A new study published in The American Journal of Gastroenterology shows that these rates in the U.S. closely mirrored trends of increased carbohydrate intake and obesity from 1973-2001.
The study illustrates what may be a public heath concern as the composition of U.S. diets changes and total carbohydrate and refined carbohydrate intakes increase. Obesity is a risk factor for many types of cancer, and a diet that includes a high percentage of calories from refined carbohydrates is a common contributor to obesity. Carbohydrates were also unique in that no other studied nutrients were found to correlate with esophageal cancer rates.
Physical job activity may cut prostate cancer risk
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Working in a job that requires a continuous level of high physical effort may decrease the likelihood of a man developing prostate cancer, researchers report.
Previous research suggested that physical activity decreases the risk of certain cancers. “This study supports this finding for prostate cancer,” Dr. Anusha Krishnadasan, at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Reuters Health.
Krishnadasan and colleagues looked at the link between prostate cancer and physical activity among men working at a southern California facility that tested aerospace engines and nuclear power systems.
