Mate Parlov, an Olympic and world champion boxer from the former Yugoslavia, has died, sports officials said Wednesday. He was 59.Parlov died late Tuesday, five months after being diagnosed with lung cancer. The Croatian died in a hospital in his hometown of Pula. Parlov was regarded as one of the best sportsmen to come from the former Yugoslavia, which Croatia was part of until 1991.

Breathing is a major complication for radiation treatment of lung cancer. The latest technology plans to tackle the problem by moving the radiation beam in unison with the breath. To help in the tracking, researchers have devised a new algorithm — similar to one used by the post office — that can predict where a tumor will be one second beforehand.

In cancer care, exercise tests are used to determine the pre-surgical fitness of lung cancer patients. In cancer research, exercise tests are most often used to evaluate patients’ cardiorespiratory fitness after a cancer diagnosis.

Childhood cancer survivors who are most likely to develop tumours as adults continue to endanger their health by smoking, research suggests

Bonnie J. Addario, a former oil-company executive in San Francisco, is a lung-cancer survivor. When she first started thinking about how to make a difference, she figured, “I’ll run a gala and a golf tournament, raise money for research, and that will be it.” Mrs. Addario, 60, raised $800,000 through a foundation she set up in 2006. She distributed the money to a number of researchers, and then realized, “there are a lot of wonderful people doing great work, but lung-cancer survival rates [of 15.5% after five years] haven’t changed for 40 years. Why is that?”

To find answers, Mrs. Addario and her husband, along with David M. Jablons, her surgeon from the University of California, San Francisco, put together a two-day conference last fall of lung-cancer researchers from major institutions around the world. She says the group identified a number of problems that hinder progress toward a cure. Among them: Researchers didn’t know what others were doing, tissue and blood specimens needed for experiments weren’t centrally located or shared, and the findings of experiments weren’t integrated to help assess what the key priorities should be.

Mrs. Addario started a new organization, the Addario Lung Cancer Medical Institute, and hired CollabRx to address some of these issues. The company is helping the institute build a virtual specimen bank where researchers participating in the project can share patient specimens and establish joint standards for collecting future specimens. Using the CollabRx Web-based network, the researchers can share research and ideas, and quickly reprioritize projects as new information comes up. Mrs. Addario says the institute expects to spend at least $5 million over the next year to set up the virtual biotech, fund researchers and establish the specimen bank.

(as reported in the Wall Street Journal)

Some cancer patients depend on volunteers to drive them to their radiation and chemotherapy treatments.

For most people, a visit to the doctor is a matter of hopping in your car and off you go. But for Stephen Conley of San Francisco, who has no car, little money and receives treatments for lung cancer five days a week, it often means hoping for a volunteer driver.

 Lung cancer has become the deadliest form of cancer among women in Sweden, overtaking breast cancer, Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare said in a report.”The death rate among women who died from lung cancer was 31 deaths (per 100,000 inhabitants) in 2006, compared to 17.7 in 1987,” an increase of 75 percent, the report said.

According to a study, Granite countertops may pose a health risk by emitting radioactive gas which can cause cancer. The unpublished study was reported in the New York Times. Rice University physics Professor W.J. Llope asserted that granite countertops, a popular staple in the homes of many people in the U.S. and abroad, give out dangerous radon fumes and gamma radiation, due to their uranium content. He stated that while many stones out of the more than a thousand varieties of granite sold in the United States are not radioactive, but a few really are and none of them is routinely tested for radioactivity.

As she watched the red balloon float into the blue sky, 5-year-old Morgan Faith Ellerbe waved and said, “I love you, Daddy.”

The balloon, which contained a lock of Morgan’s hair, was released in honor of her father, Daniel Ellerbe, who died in April of lung cancer.