LungBlog

My mom was a step ahead of scientists, hiding the cookie jar when I was a kid. Of course, she didn’t have access to studies published in 2009, but her advice extends even now to my passion. Her argument focused on our teeth and our waistlines, but skipping that extra cookie may be a good idea for lung health as well.

One of my areas of interest is studying gender-related differences in lung cancer. Earlier this year, I wrote a post about interesting data that had come out of the Women’s Health Initiative study. This was the landmark study that established that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for postmenopausal women did more harm than good. When originally presented in 2002, the investigators noted significantly increased risks of breast cancer, cardiovascular disease and stroke.

A few weeks ago, a healthy patient in her early 40s came to my office requesting a CT scan of the chest. She was a smoker and wanted to be sure that she didn’t have lung cancer.

I explained to her that a CT, or computerized tomography, scan was not a good test for lung cancer. I even pulled up the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force guidelines on my computer to show her that there was no compelling evidence to support screening.

Obesity may have an even greater impact on mortality than anticipated, according to a new method of adjusting for confounding.

When a son’s body mass index was linked to a father’s cardiovascular disease mortality, risk increased 82% with each higher standard deviation of BMI (P=0.008), according to Finn Rasmussen, MD, MPH, PhD, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and colleagues.

… Higher offspring BMI was linked to higher lung cancer mortality in mothers and fathers (HR 1.12 and 1.03, respectively, both P<0.001) and higher mortality from respiratory diseases overall for mothers (HR 1.05, P<0.001) and fathers (HR 1.02, P=0.048).

Lung growth is the principal instigate of sarcoma deaths in both women and men in the United States and throughout the world. Lung melanoma has surpassed breast plague as the leading motive of sarcoma deaths in women.

Lung cancer is the most lethal form of cancer in the United States and other developed countries today. And the fact that most cancer treatments work well on other types of cancer that often do not work well with lung cancer. In addition, the fact is that lung cancer is often not diagnosed until it is advanced, and it is easy to see why this disease is often fatal.

Steeleye Span founder Tim Hart has died at the age of 61 from lung cancer.

Hart was diagnosed 12 months ago in December 2008 and told the cancer was inoperable.

Tim Hart formed his first band Rattfinks while he was still at St Albans High School. The school also generated another famous band, The Zombies.

Uniting Against Lung Cancer (formerly Joan’s Legacy) announced its funding of new research into lung cancer in 2009 – bringing the foundation’s total research funding to over $6 million. Eleven $100,000 grants were made in collaboration with research-focused lung cancer groups, supporting research projects into earlier diagnosis and treatment of the disease at nationally-recognized institutions.

A new study suggests there’s a link between having heavy sons and cardiovascular death, but having underweight sons appears to be less hazardous than expected.

Previous research has already linked obesity to higher rates of death from cardiovascular disease, diabetes and some kinds of cancer. Studies have also shown that very thin people may be at higher risk of death from conditions such as respiratory disease and lung cancer, but some researchers question those findings.

The ability to make, test, and map the atomic structure of new anti-cancer agents has enabled a team of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists to discover a compound capable of halting a common type of drug-resistant lung cancer.

In a study to be published in the December 24/31 issue of the journal Nature, the researchers report that non-small cell lung cancers that had become invulnerable to the drugs Iressa- and Tarceva- were stymied by a compound designed and formulated in a Dana-Farber lab.