Cancer
Checking more lymph nodes linked to cancer patient survival
Why do patients with gastric or pancreatic cancer live longer when they are treated at cancer centers or high-volume hospitals than patients treated at low-volume or community hospitals?
New research from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine found that cancer patients have more lymph nodes examined for the spread of their disease if they are treated at hospitals performing more cancer surgeries or those designated as comprehensive cancer centers.
Lymph node metastases (indicating the spread of cancer) have been shown to predict patients’ prognosis after cancer tissue is removed from the stomach or pancreas. If too few lymph nodes are examined for malignant cells, a patient’s cancer may be incorrectly classified, which alters the prognosis, treatment decisions and eligibility for clinical trials.
Has Cancer Spread? Research Identifies Best Way to Find Answers
For patients with head and neck cancer, accurately determining how advanced the cancer is and detecting secondary cancers usually means undergoing numerous tests - until now. New Saint Louis University research has found that the PET-CT scanner can be used as a stand-alone tool to detect secondary cancers, which occur in 5 to 10 percent of head and neck cancer patients.
The study findings, which were presented on Tuesday, July 22, at the 7th International Conference on Head and Neck Cancer in San Francisco, Calif., will streamline care for head and neck cancer patients allowing them to begin treatment earlier, says Michael Odell, M.D., assistant professor of otolaryngology at Saint Louis University School of Medicine.
“There has been a lot of confusion about the best ways to evaluate head and neck cancer patients to see if their cancer has spread,” said Odell, the study’s primary author.
“Emotional” writing may help ease cancer pain
Some cancer patients may find that putting their emotions down in writing helps improve their pain and general well-being, a study suggests.
Such writing, part of a concept called “narrative” medicine, has been seen as a way to aid communication between seriously ill patients and their doctors.
But the act of writing, itself, may also help patients better understand themselves and their needs, according to the study team, led by Dr. M. Soledad Cepeda of Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston.
Computer Predicts Anti-Cancer Molecules
A new computer-based method of analyzing cellular activity has correctly predicted the anti-tumour activity of several molecules. Research published today in BioMed Central’s open access journal, Molecular Cancer, describes ‘CoMet’ – a tool that studies the integrated machinery of the cell and predicts those components that will have an effect on cancer.
Jeffery Skolnick, professor in the School of Biology and director of the Center for the Study of Systems Biology, in collaboration with John McDonald, chair of the School of Biology, led a team from the Georgia Institute of Technology who have developed this new strategy.
“This opens up the possibility of novel therapeutics for cancer and develops our understanding of why such metabolites work. CoMet provides a deeper understanding of the molecular mechanisms of cancer,” said Skolnick.
Obesity ups a woman’s pancreatic cancer risk: study
Obese women who carry most of their extra weight around the stomach are 70 percent more likely to develop pancreatic cancer, an international team of researchers reported on Tuesday.
The findings suggest are some of the first evidence that the link between obesity and pancreatic cancer is as strong in women as in men, Juhua Luo of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and colleagues reported in the British Journal of Cancer.
“We found that the risk of developing pancreatic cancer was significantly raised in obese postmenopausal women who carry most of their excess weight around the stomach,” she said in a statement.
Smoking linked to decrease in uterine cancer risk
Cigarette smoking appears to be associated with a decreased risk of cancer of the endometrium, the inner lining of the uterus, research from China suggests.
“The benefit of smoking was observed almost exclusively in postmenopausal women and not in premenopausal women,” principal investigator Dr. Bin Wang of Nanjing Medical University told Reuters Health.
However, in spite of this link, “cigarette smoking could dramatically increase the incidence of many other chronic diseases,” Wang pointed out.
Breast Asymmetry After Cancer Treatment Affects Quality of Life
Most women with breast cancer assume that surgery to preserve their breast will be less disfiguring than a mastectomy that removes the entire breast.
But nearly one-third of women reported pronounced asymmetry between their breasts, and that perceived disfigurement greatly affects a woman’s quality of life after treatment, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The researchers found that compared to women with little to no breast asymmetry, women whose affected breast looked significantly different were twice as likely to fear their cancer recurring and to have symptoms of depression. These women were also more likely to perceive themselves as less healthy and to feel stigmatized by their breast cancer treatment.
New fertility technique targets women with cancer
A new technique may help newly diagnosed cancer patients preserve their eggs, and perhaps their fertility, before chemotherapy, German researchers said on Monday.
Currently, many women collect and freeze some of their eggs to try to have children after their cancer treatment, which can make them infertile. The process can take up to six weeks.
However, if a cancer diagnosis comes at the start of the menstrual cycle, many women are unable to delay chemotherapy and preserve their eggs, Michael Von Wolf told the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.
Cells in blood may help cancers spread: US study
Normal cells in the blood that play a role in healing wounds may also be creating the right conditions for cancer cells to spread, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
They said fibrocytes, blood cells derived from bone marrow, could explain how healthy cells become habitats for cancer.
“Cancer cells do not enter healthy tissue easily. We know that,” Dr. Hendrik van Deventer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose research appears in the American Journal of Pathology, said in a telephone interview.
Elevated biomarkers predict risk for prostate cancer recurrence
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
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
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
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
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
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.
