Rob Densen from the Huffington Post, August 30, 2011

Our late refrigerator was a full-length side by side, with beveled wood panels on the doors which we got to match the cabinetry when we remodeled the kitchen. When it came to a replacement, I had relented on figuring out how to match the cabinets, but I was insistent on a side by side. My wife preferred the fridge-on-top-with-French-doors-freezer-on-the-bottom arrangement that is all the rage.

For the record, my preference for a side by side wasn’t just a matter of style. With a reconstructed knee, a frozen shoulder, and two bulging discs in my back wrapped around a giant lazy streak, I generally go out of my way to avoid any sort of bending motion. It’s not impossible, just a little uncomfortable.

In the week we dilly-dallied, the food was melting in the fridge — and my wife was on the way.

The next night I returned home and all was fine. “I ordered the top/down model. It will be here Thursday.”

She had been to her Pilates class earlier in the day and, in the midst of a long discussion with her instructor, it all became clear. “I realized,” she said, “that this will be my last refrigerator.”

A Life Measured in Kilowatt Hours

I couldn’t argue with her. Not with the logic and, most regrettably, not with the truthfulness of that statement. My wife has Stage IV lung cancer. Given the arc of the disease and the quality of refrigerator design and construction, it is highly probable that this will be her last refrigerator. The question is, are we also on our last washing machine, hairdryer or big screen TV?

By Frederik Joelving

NEW YORK | Fri Aug 26, 2011 6:57pm EDT

(Reuters Health) – Very few patients who’ve had cancer surgery end up participating in clinical trials to test new treatments, researchers have found.

And those who do participate are younger and usually white, fueling concerns that new drugs may not fare as well once they hit the market because trial subjects don’t match real-world users.

FDA has given the regulatory nod to crizotinib, Pfizer’s ALK inhibitor that has proven very effective in the small portion of the population whose lung cancer is driven by the protein.

Pfizer says the drug, to be sold under the brand name Xalkori, will cost $9,600 per month, and it will provide assistance so that patient co-pays will not exceed $100. It’s the first in a handful of new drugs Pfizer is counting on to help offset the sales drain when the patent expires this fall on its blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor.

Research into an enzyme that produces a hormone released after sex has inspired Australian National University chemists to create new treatments for small-cell lung cancer.

Led by Professor Chris Easton and PhD student Ms. Lucy Cao from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Free Radical Chemistry and Biotechnology at ANU, the team are working to reduce the number of small-cell lung cancer deaths by building new drugs that target the biology underlying the disease. Their work has been published in the latest edition of The Royal Society Chemistry journal, Medicinal Chemistry Communications.

“Given that one in every 28 Australians are diagnosed with lung cancer and it is the most common cause of cancer death, there is a real need to develop new pharmaceuticals to treat this disease. Although it is still early days our results are very promising,” said Professor Easton.

The team are investigating an enzyme, known as PAM, which activates a number of important peptide hormones. These include calcitonin, which promotes cell proliferation, and oxytocin, dubbed the ‘love hormone’, as it produces feelings of contentment following orgasm. Imbalances in peptide hormones have been shown to cause inflammatory diseases, asthma, and various cancers.

Study Shows Some Dogs Can Be Trained to Identify Lung Cancer When They Sniff a Person’s Breath

By Brenda Goodman,WebMD Health News

Aug. 17, 2011 — German researchers say that highly trained dogs are able to reliably sniff out lung cancer in human breath.

In its early stages, lung cancer has few symptoms, making it difficult for doctors to catch it early, when it’s still treatable.

“This is the holy grail,” says Suresh S. Ramalingam, MD, associate professor and director of the lung program at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta.

“The whole field is focused on using something that’s readily available that does not involve an expensive surgery or scan that would allow us to find early cancers,” says Ramalingam, who is developing technology that aims to replicate the ability of dogs to smell trace amount of chemicals produced by cancerous tumors. He was not involved in the research.

From Public Radio International’s Here and Now

Dr. Peter Mazzone, Pulmonologist at the Cleveland Clinic, is developing a breath test that he calls an “electronic nose.” It sits on a cart, looks like a big computer, and his patients breath into a mouthpiece on the machine. The machine tells him what patterns of chemicals are coming out patients’ breath. This allows him to look for markers that might indicate diseases like diabetes, asthma or even lung cancer.

With the breath test, patients can avoid risky biopsies or expensive imaging scans. Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic say they have an 85 percent accuracy in spotting lung cancer using a breathalyzer.

For immediate release – August 17, 2011 (Toronto) – Smokers with variations in two specific genes have a greater risk of smoking more cigarettes, becoming more dependent on nicotine and developing lung cancer, a new study from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) shows.

The cancer risk from these two genes appears to be even higher in smokers who consume 20 or fewer cigarettes a day, according to the study published in the September issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

CAMH Scientist Dr. Rachel Tyndale and her team studied two genes: the nicotine metabolic gene (CYP2A6) and the nicotinic gene cluster (CHRNA5-A3-B3). These genes have been independently linked to smoking behaviours and lung cancer.

by Linda Fugate, PhD

Some smokers get lung cancer and others do not. The reason for this may involve bacterial infection, according to a review by Dr. Seyed Javad Moghaddam of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, and colleagues at three other research institutions. Nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi) is the main culprit, they reported. This pathogen is similar to Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), which is a common cause of meningitis, pneumonia, and ear infections in children who have not been vaccinated against it. The nontypeable variety is missing the polysaccharide capsule present in Hib and other, less common varieties.

By Alan Mozes

HealthDay Reporter for US News and World Report

Finding runs counter to expert recommendations against use of the therapy by those over 70

MONDAY, Aug. 8 (HealthDay News) — Countering conventional wisdom, researchers in France say that elderly lung cancer patients can gain significant benefit from an aggressive, double-barreled chemotherapy that’s often used in younger patients.

The finding raises questions about standard public health recommendations, such as those issued the American Society of Clinical Oncology in 2004, which advised physicians not to expose elderly patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) to the undesirable side effects of combination chemotherapy.

Japanese and American companies plan to commission clinical trials of a promising lung cancer drug developed in New Zealand.

The drug, called PR610, is part of a new class developed by scientists at the Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre and the Maurice Wilkins research centre. They preserve healthy tissue by becoming active only in the “hypoxic” parts of tumours – the zones without oxygen.