http://www.health.am/cr/ http://www.health.am/cr/more/may-not-prolong-their-lives/ Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine have found that post-operative radiation therapy (PORT), a controversial yet frequently administered treatment for lung cancer, may not prolong life in older people with locally advanced disease. The findings appear in the February 13 online edition of CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society. In patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the standard of care is surgery to remove the tumor. However, in patients with stage III disease and involvement of a type of lymph node called N2, clinicians will often prescribe a course of PORT to improve outcomes. “While some analyses have shown improvement with PORT, the data are not strong enough to support using it as a standard of care in older adults with this type of lung cancer,” said Juan Wisnivesky, MD, DrPH, Vice-Chair for Research in the Department of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and lead author on the study. “Our results show that we need more information about the potential benefits of radiation therapy before it is used routinely to treat these patients, especially considering the side effects associated with it.” 2012-02-13T07:37:00-08:00 http://www.health.am/cr/more/slow-prostate-tumor-growth/ Curcumin, an active component of the Indian curry spice turmeric, may help slow down tumor growth in castration-resistant prostate cancer patients on androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), a study from researchers at Jefferson’s Kimmel Cancer Center suggests. Reporting in a recent issue of Cancer Research, Karen Knudsen, Ph.D., a Professor of Cancer Biology, Urology and Radiation Oncology at Thomas Jefferson University, and colleagues observed in a pre-clinical study that curcumin suppresses two known nuclear receptor activators, p300 and CPB (or CREB1-binding protein), which have been shown to work against ADT. ADT aims to inhibit the androgen receptor - an important male hormone in the development and progression of prostate cancer - in patients. But a major mechanism of therapeutic failure and progression to advanced disease is inappropriate reactivation of this receptor. Sophisticated tumor cells, with the help of p300 and CPB, sometimes bypass the therapy.  2012-02-12T19:36:01-08:00 http://www.health.am/cr/more/aim-at-breast-cancer-stem-cells/ Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center researchers have again proven that injecting multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) into tumors and heating them with a quick, 30-second laser treatment can kill them. The results of the first effort involving kidney tumors was published in 2009, but now they’ve taken the science and directed it at breast cancer tumors, specifically the tumor initiating cancer stem cells. These stem cells are hard to kill because they don’t divide very often and many anti-cancer strategies are directed at killing the cells that divide frequently. The Wake Forest Baptist research findings are reported online ahead of April print publication in the journal Biomaterials. The research is a result of a collaborative effort between Wake Forest School of Medicine, the Wake Forest University Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials, and Rice University. Lead investigator and professor of biochemistry Suzy V. Torti, Ph.D., of Wake Forest Baptist, said the breast cancer stem cells tend to be resistant to drugs and radiotherapy, so targeting these particular cells is of great interest in the scientific community. 2012-02-09T18:36:00-08:00 http://www.health.am/cr/more/ovarian-cancer-risk/ In a study conducted by researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center and colleagues from 11 other institutions in the Unites States and the United Kingdom, genes that are known to be involved in inflammation were found to be related to risk of ovarian cancer. Their study appeared in a recent issue of Cancer Research, published by the American Association for Cancer Research. Chronic inflammation is known to influence risk of several cancers, including ovarian cancer. The researchers identified 27 genes that are involved in inflammation and sought to determine whether inter-individual differences in these genes were related to risk of ovarian cancer. To do that they determined the frequency of 162 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, pronounced “snips”) in DNA extracted from a blood sample provided by approximately 900 women with ovarian cancer (cases) and 1000 cancer-free women (controls). Whenever a SNP is observed it means that there are two forms (alleles) of the gene and the least common one is termed the “minor allele.” The frequency of 21 of the 162 SNPs differed between the cases and controls and was subsequently examined in a larger study that included 3,100 cases and 2,100 controls from five independent studies.  2012-02-08T08:51:00-08:00 http://www.health.am/cr/more/risk-of-death-from-breast-cancer/ Among postmenopausal women with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer, increasing age was associated with a higher risk of death from breast cancer, according to a study in the February 8 issue of JAMA. “Breast cancer is the leading contributor to cancer incidence and cancer mortality in women worldwide, with 1,383,500 new cases in 2008. In the United States in 2008, 41 percent of these women were aged 65 years or older at diagnosis. Because breast cancer incidence increases with increasing age, changing demographics and continuously increasing life expectancy will further enlarge the number of older women confronted with breast cancer,” according to background information in the article. “In addition to classic tumor-related prognostic factors, patient characteristics may be associated with breast cancer outcome.” Willemien van de Water, M.D., of the Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, the Netherlands, and colleagues conducted a study to assess disease-specific mortality among age groups in postmenopausal patients with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer. The study consisted of an analysis of 9,766 patients enrolled in the TEAM (Tamoxifen Exemestane Adjuvant Multinational) randomized clinical trial between January 2001 and January 2006. Age at diagnosis was categorized as younger than 65 years (n = 5,349), 65 to 74 years (n = 3,060), and 75 years or older (n = 1,357). 2012-02-08T08:42:01-08:00 http://www.health.am/cr/more/ovarian-cancer-screening-popular-despite-guidelines/ Despite expert guidelines and scientific evidence to the contrary, a third of U.S. primary care physicians believe ovarian cancer screening is effective and many would offer it to patients, according to a new survey. Although the results don’t necessarily translate into real practice, that means more than a million women might be offered the tests, which come with a hefty price tag and possible hazards, researchers say. “Currently the evidence suggests that the harms of ovarian cancer screening exceed the benefits,” said Dr. Laura-Mae Baldwin of the University of Washington in Seattle. 2012-02-07T10:31:01-08:00 http://www.health.am/cr/more/prognosis-in-challenging-breast-cancer-cases/ In two new studies featured in the February issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine, researchers are revealing how molecular imaging can be used to solve mysteries about difficult cases of breast cancer. One article focuses on an imaging agent that targets estrogen receptors in estrogen receptor–positive breast cancer patients with formerly inconclusive assessments, and the second highlights a different imaging agent’s ability to help predict the prognosis for patients undergoing chemotherapy for a very aggressive type of breast cancer. Conventional imaging and biopsy are not always enough to diagnose and characterize suspected metastatic breast cancers, especially for patients who cannot receive repeated biopsies due to the location of the cancer or other existing illnesses. It is estimated that 75 percent of breast tumors show estrogen receptor activity at the point of diagnosis, and that estrogen receptor expression is an indicator of not only active cancer lesions, but patients’ potential response to therapy, as well. Researchers found that whole-body positron emission tomography (PET) with 16a-18F-fluoro-17b-estradiol (18F-FES), a molecular imaging technique, provides an entirely non-invasive means of capturing estrogen receptor expression in estrogen receptor–positive metastatic breast cancer. It has the potential to help physicians make more accurate judgments about extent of disease, specifically whether anti-hormonal therapies would be beneficial for patients who had inconclusive assessments using more conventional methods.  2012-02-07T08:53:00-08:00 http://www.health.am/cr/more/three-targeted-cancer-drugs/ -Treatment with three relatively new “targeted” cancer drugs has been linked to a slightly elevated chance of fatal side effects, according to a new analysis led by scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. They added that the risk remains low, but should be taken into account by physicians and patients. The incidence of fatal complications was 1.5 percent in patients who received any of the three drugs, which block the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) tyrosine kinase receptors in cancer cells, according to the study published February 6 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. This is compared to a 0.7 percent incidence in patients given standard treatments or placebos. The study looked at three drugs: sorafenib (Nexavar), sunitinib (Sutent), and pazopanib (Votrient). Sorafenib is approved to treat kidney and liver cancer, sunitinib to treat kidney cancer and gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST), and pazopanib to treat kidney cancer. 2012-02-07T08:48:01-08:00 http://www.health.am/cr/more/our-promise-to-black-women/ When 27-year-old Shaneera made the decision to breastfeed her newly born daughter in August 2007, little did she know that decision to breastfeed would change her life.  Wanting to give her daughter the gift of a good life start, Shaneera was anxious when she felt a lump while nursing. After months of being brushed off by her primary health care provider, multiple referrals to breast surgeons and misdiagnosis, she was finally diagnosed with stage three breast cancer.  In less than three years, on June 23, 2010, Shaneera died of breast cancer. Her husband and now 3-year-old daughter cannot understand what happened. And neither can we at the Black Women’s Health Imperative understand why Black women have not benefited from the progress being made in research and new technologies. Our mission in launching a new educational campaign is to raise questions, seek understanding, and call attention to what is happening to young Black women. This is what we know. We know that although Black women have a lower breast cancer incidence rate than other women, Black women are dying at a significantly higher rate than any other group of women. This fact is more complex than many may think. And most alarmingly, we don’t know why. 2012-02-06T21:39:00-08:00 http://www.health.am/cr/more/breast-cancer-kills-more-black-women/ Black women are 50 percent more likely than any other racial or ethnic group to die from advanced breast cancer, even if they receive radiation therapy. “We knew from our earlier study that blacks with advanced breast cancer were less likely to be treated with radiation, so we expected to see that their survival would be poorer because of that,” says Steve R. Martinez, assistant professor of surgical oncology at University of California, Davis. “We were surprised to find that blacks fare worse regardless of whether they receive radiation therapy and actually appear to be less responsive to one of our most important treatments.” 2012-02-06T21:33:00-08:00