August 13th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
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British researchers identified a faulty gene associated with a one-in-11 chance of developing ovarian cancer, and they think drugs for breast cancer might also work in these women.
Researchers from England’s Institute of Cancer Research reported that they compared DNA from women from 911 families with ovarian and breast cancer and to a control group of 1,060 people from the general population.
They found eight gene faults in theRAD51Dgene in women with cancer, compared with one in the control group. TheRAD51Dgene repairs damaged DNA, and when it’s faulty, cells are more likely to turn cancerous.
Results appear Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
August 10th, 2011 by AndrewSchorr in Opinion, Research
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You have heard it countless times, “The War on Cancer.” President Nixon announced it. The National Cancer Institute has spearheaded what TV and radio commercials always talk about as “the fight against cancer.” Singular. But we really need to start thinking about it as a plural. Wars on cancer. Fights against cancer. Taking it one step further, we need to see each person’s fight as an individual battle. Not just individualized to the patient’s spirit or age or sense of hope, but individualized to his or her particular biology, matched up with the specific cancer and available treatments. That is the nature of “personalized medicine” applied to cancer. We’ve been talking about it for a few years around here, but what’s exciting now is that even more super smart people in the cancer scientific community are devoting themselves to it.
I met two people like that today near the research labs at the University of Washington in Seattle. Without giving too much away (they’ve got big plans), these two hematologist-oncologists, with many advanced degrees between them and decades of experience, are trying to build something really big that could lengthen lives and save many too.
What they’re trying to do is Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Andrew's Blog*
August 8th, 2011 by DeborahSchwarzRPA in Announcements
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On Thursday, October 20, The Pancreas Center of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center will be holding the 2011 Gigi Shaw Arledge Conference on Pancreatic Diseases. This all-day event is targeted for clinicians and scientists, covering pancreatic cancer research from basic, translational, clinical and epidemiological perspectives and will feature distinguished guest lecturers and leaders in the field of pancreatic diseases.
The conference is being held due to the generous support of the Gigi Arledge Foundation. Giselle (Gigi) Arledge, the late wife of Columbia Trustee and benefactor Roone Arledge, passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2010. According to foundation President Catherine Shaw, ” Now is the time to move pancreatic cancer research forward. Dr. Chabot, Dr. Wang and the team at The Pancreas Center are leaders in this battle. With their focus on research, treatment and prevention, they are helping develop society’s knowledge of pancreatic cancer. In my mother’s honor, I have donated a research and endowment fund that will support the Center’s scientific research”.
*This blog post was originally published at Columbia University Department of Surgery Blog*
July 21st, 2011 by GarySchwitzer in News, Research
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Several newspapers in the UK reported this week that cancer rates have risen over the past two decades. That set into motion an analysis by the excellent “Behind the Headlines” service offered by the NHS Choices website. They found this in newspapers:
“Cancer rates in the middle-aged “have jumped by almost a fifth in a generation”, according to The Daily Telegraph, which says that the increase “is thought to be mainly due to better detection of cancers rather than people adopting more unhealthy lifestyles”. The Sun takes the alternate view, saying that doctors are “blaming the rise on obesity and home boozing”. The Daily Mail similarly suggests that lifestyle changes are to blame.”
You don’t have to live in the UK to learn from their analysis.
They wrote:
“One factor contributing to these increases is likely to be higher rates of detection due to the NHS breast cancer screening programme and the PSA test for prostate cancer. The raw data behind these stats also needs to be placed into context: these particular cancer diagnosis rates are drawn from the datasets for England from the Office of National Statistics and similar datasets from registries in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. The ONS urges caution when interpreting its data, particularly when looking at trends across time, or differences across regions.
For example, Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*
March 3rd, 2011 by David H. Gorski, M.D., Ph.D. in Opinion, Quackery Exposed, Research
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Last Friday, Mark Crislip posted an excellent deconstruction of a very disappointing article that appeared in the most recent issue of Skeptical Inquirer (SI), the flagship publication of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). I say “disappointing,” because I was disappointed to see SI publish such a biased, poorly thought out article, apparently for the sake of controversy. I’m a subscriber myself, and in general enjoy reading the magazine, although of late I must admit that I don’t always read each issue cover to cover the way I used to do. Between work, grant writing, blogging, and other activities, my outside reading, even of publications I like, has declined. Perhaps SI will soon find itself off my reading list.
Be that as it may, I couldn’t miss the article that so irritated Mark, because it irritated me as well. There it was, emblazoned prominently on the cover of the March/April 2011 issue: “Seven Deadly Medical Hypotheses.” I flipped through the issue to the article to find out that this little gem was written by someone named Michael Spector, M.D. A tinge of familiarity going through my brain, I tried to think where I had heard that name before.
And then I remembered.
Dr. Spector, it turns out, first got on my nerves about a year ago, when he wrote an article for the January/February 2010 issue of SI entitled “The War on Cancer: A Progress Report for Skeptics.” I remember at that time being irritated by the article and wanting to pen a discussion of the points in that article but don’t recall why I never did. It was probably a combination of the fact that SI doesn’t publish its articles online until some months have passed and perhaps my laziness about having to manually transcribe with my own little typing fingers any passages of text that I wanted to cite. By the time the article was available online, I forgot about it and never came back to it — until now. I should therefore, right here, right now, publicly thank Mark (and, of course, Dr. Spector) for providing me the opportunity to revisit that article in the context of piling on, so to speak, Dr. Spector’s most recent article. After all, Deadly Hypothesis Seven (as Dr. Spector so cheesily put it) is:
From a cancer patient population and public health perspective, cancer chemotherapy (chemo) has been a major medical advance.
Dr. Spector then takes this opportunity to cite copiously from his 2010 article, sprinkling “(Spector, 2010)” throughout the text like powdered sugar on a cupcake. There’s the opening I needed to justify revisiting an article that’s more than a year old! And what fantastic timing, too, hot on the heals of my post from a couple of weeks ago entitled “Why Haven’t We Cured Cancer Yet?” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
Researchers from England’s Institute of Cancer Research reported that they compared DNA from women from 911 families with ovarian and breast cancer and to a control group of 1,060 people from the general population.
