May 31st, 2010
About 1.6 million people will get a cancer diagnosis this year. The majority of them will be subjected to chemo and radiation — a brutal approach that might or might not work. Doctors are trying to take the guesswork out of cancer by tailoring treatment to each patient. The new approach is giving two terminal cancer patients the gift of time.
It’s an unlikely place to find inspiration, but it is where Beverly Sotir fuels her fighting spirit.
“I have a CAT scan on my bathroom wall, and every morning,” said Beverly Sotir. “I go into the bathroom, take my shower, come out and I can’t tell you what I say to it, but I swear at it, and I tell it to get out of my body and leave me alone.”
May 31st, 2010
FIFTEEN former rugby captains will help put Wales at the forefront of ground-breaking international lung cancer research.
Money raised by the Brains SA Captains Climb team – the captains and coach Warren Gatland will attempt to reach the summit of Kilimanjaro in September – will allow the Wales Cancer Bank to start collecting lung cancer samples.
These samples will in turn be available to leading lung cancer research scientists around the world.
The Brains SA Captains Climb will also improve care for patients diagnosed with lung cancer in Wales and support home-grown research projects.
May 29th, 2010
After enduring nearly 20 rounds of chemotherapy and a half dozen radiation treatments, Jill Costello went looking for a miracle. A year ago, this young, fit nonsmoker and senior coxswain on Cal’s women’s crew was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer.
Stage IV is the most advanced form of the disease.
May 29th, 2010
A team at Roche’s biotechnology unit Genentech in California compared all the genetic changes in a single patient’s lung tumor with healthy tissue from the patient, a 51-year-old man who had smoked an average of 25 cigarettes per day for 15 years before the tumor was removed.
What they found were as many as 50,000 genetic mutations.
“Fifty thousand is a huge number. No one has ever reported such a high number,” said Zemin Zhang of Genentech, whose findings appear in the journal Nature.
“This is likely associated with the smoking history of the patient. It is very alarming,” Zhang said in a telephone interview.
Smoking is the biggest single cause of lung cancer, and studies suggest mutations occur with each cigarette smoked.
May 28th, 2010
Vegetables and chicken are about all that Robbin Cobb and her husband, William, have eaten since he was diagnosed with lung cancer two years ago.
Robbin Cobb, 50, a certified Master Gardener, realizes not everyone knows about the importance of eating fresh fruit and veggies — rich in cancer-fighting antioxidants and other nutrients. So on Thursday, she lent her green thumb to a new cancer-prevention initiative of the Little Red Door Cancer Agency: a small community garden.
May 28th, 2010
In the following video, Helen Ross, M.D., a medical oncologist at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, provides an overview of what women should know about lung cancer.
Lung cancer has become one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths among women.
May 26th, 2010
Malignant lung tumors may contain not one, not two, but potentially tens of thousands of genetic mutations which, together, contribute to the development of the cancer.
A sample from a lung tumor from a heavy smoker revealed 50,000 mutations, according to a report in the May 27 issue of Nature.
“People in the field have always known that we’re going to end up having to deal with multiple mutations,” said Dr. Hossein Borghaei, director of the Lung and Head and Neck Cancer Risk Assessment Program at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. “This tells us that we’re not just dealing with one cell line that’s gone crazy. We’re dealing with multiple mutations. Every possible pathway that could possibly go wrong is probably found among all these mutations and changes.”
May 26th, 2010
A drug derived from shark cartilage failed to improve survival in patients with advanced lung cancer, researchers report.
The disappointing results, which came in the final stage of testing, showed that the drug didn’t help extend the life spans of patients with inoperable stage III non-small cell lung cancer.
Scientists have been testing drugs derived from shark cartilage because it appears to prevent blood vessels from growing around tumors. The hope is that the drugs will prevent cancer cells from being fed by blood, which allows them to grow.
Researchers led by Dr. Charles Lu, of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, tested the specific drug in question, known as AE-941, on patients in the United States and Canada.
May 26th, 2010
Shark cartilage was once widely promoted as an anti-cancer agent and is still via the Internet for that purpose, based on the mistaken belief that sharks do not get cancer. The possibility that the cartilage could be beneficial was supported by early studies which suggested that it has anti-angiogenic properties — that is, it prevents the growth of blood vessels that nourish tumors. But the first clinical trial of a shark cartilage product shows that it has no value at all.
May 26th, 2010
The addition of the shark cartilage extract AE-941 (also known as Neovastat) to standard chemoradiotherapy does not improve survival in patients with inoperable stage III non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to results of a large multicenter study published online May 26 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI).
The results were first reported at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s 2007 annual meeting. (See Reuters Health report June 4, 2007: Shark cartilage extract of no benefit in non-small cell lung cancer.)
About 1.6 million people will get a cancer diagnosis this year. The majority of them will be subjected to chemo and radiation — a brutal approach that might or might not work. Doctors are trying to take the guesswork out of cancer by tailoring treatment to each patient. The new approach is giving two terminal cancer patients the gift of time.
