Michael Jarret/Genomic Health
A large study confirms that a test doctors have been using for a decade works well for low-risk patients. More work is needed to draw conclusions about chemotherapy for women with riskier tumors.
Read more at NPR.org.
Courtesy of TED
Dr. Dean Ornish studied how lifestyle changes could help people with chronic heart disease; he wanted to figure out if there was a way to do the same with some types of cancer.
Read more and watch his TED talk at NPR.org.
iStockphoto
Terminal cancer patients sometimes get chemotherapy in the belief that it will ease their symptoms. But a study finds that many who get the treatment near death actually have a poorer quality of life.
Read more at NPR.org.
iStockphoto
A comparison of women in 547 U.S. counties found that getting more women in for screening mammograms didn’t lower death rates from breast cancer. More small cancers were found.
Read more at NPR.org.
James Bridges/Temple Hill
Entertainment/Kobal Collection
Young cancer patients are more likely than older adult patients to be hospitalized or get chemo in the month before death, a study finds. Talking about end-of-life wishes is crucial, researchers say.
Read more at NPR.org.
Alyson Hurt/NPR
Since 1970, the national colorectal cancer death rate has been cut in half. But progress has lagged in the Lower Mississippi Delta, Appalachia and counties in eastern Virginia and North Carolina.
Read more at NPR.org.
iStockphoto
Changes in sunscreen labels designed to make them clearer don’t seem to be doing the job, a survey finds. Less than one quarter of people knew that SPF value relates to preventing sunburns.
Read more at NPR.org.
Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images
That’s another way of referring to gynecological cancers, which strike more than 1 million women a year — and are on the rise in the developing world.
Read more at NPR.org.
Scott Camazine/Science Source
A doctor-scientist’s long quest to help children with a rare form of brain cancer has led to the discovery that high levels of brain activity can make glioma tumors grow faster.
Read more at NPR.org.
Medical Body Scans/Science Source
Medicare now pays for some long-term smokers to get an annual test. These scans could save thousands of lives each year, but some doctors still worry risks outweigh benefits.
Read more at NPR.org.
Kari Lehr/Image Zoo/Corbis
In 2009, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force said the benefits of mammograms for women under 50 were small at best. A firestorm ensued. Now the organization is back with the same message.
Read more at NPR.org.
iStockphoto
A company has priced its test for mutations linked to breast and ovarian cancer at $249 — far less than the thousands of dollars another firm charges. But is there a downside for the worried well?
Read more at NPR.org.
American Cancer Society/AP
The Pap smear has dramatically decreased rates of cervical cancer, but testing too often has a downside, too. Many women say they aren’t yet ready to follow new guidelines and skip the annual tests.
Read more at NPR.org.
Hero Images/Corbis
Each year the U.S. spends billions of dollars on unnecessary tests and treatments that result from inaccurate mammograms, some scientists say. They’re calling for more selective screening.
Read more at NPR.org.
Kevin Curtis/Science Source
Genetic profiling of cancer cells can help guide treatment, but such profiles can be ambiguous. Results would be more accurate if all labs tested normal cells from each patient too.
Read more at NPR.org.
Writing in the New York Times, the actress, who had a preventative double mastectomy two years ago, says she carries a gene that gives her an elevated risk of cancer and describes the decision to undergo preventative surgery to have her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed.
Read more her full statement at NYTimes.com.
Matthias Kulka/Corbis
When you dig into the numbers on cancer, the results are mixed. Overall, deaths are up. But survival five years after diagnosis has improved for many forms of the disease, including breast cancer.
Read more at NPR.org.
Vidhya Nagaragjan for NPR
Medical researchers have made only modest progress treating the most common cancers since the war on cancer was declare in 1971. The disease has proved far more complicated than doctors had hoped.
Read more at NPR.org.
Boilershot Photo/Science Source
A new study finds pathologists are great at spotting cancer, but less so at identifying atypical cells and DCIS, which is troubling because both conditions can go on to become invasive cancer, and misdiagnosis could lead to women getting too much treatment — or not enough.
Read more at NPR.org.
Our immune systems constantly fight off disease — protecting us from colds, flu and infection, but could they also help us treat cancer? An experimental new treatment called immunotherapy is helping patients’ immune systems fight cancer.
Read more at NPR.org.
A 17-year-old says she doesn’t want to undergo treatment for Hodgkin lymphoma, but her doctors and the state say she will die without it. The Connecticut Supreme Court is hearing the case.
Read more at NPR.org.
Dr. Richard Schlegel and postdoctoral fellow Nancy Palechor-Ceron use a microscope to look at human epithelial cells growing on mouse fibroblasts at Georgetown University Medical Center. Source: Lauren Wolkoff/Georgetown University.
Historically, it has been difficult to culture human cell lines in the lab, but the discovery that human cells grow well on a bed of mouse cells has opened the door for new studies of human disease. Using this new technique of culturing human cancer cells on a bed of mouse cells, researchers at Georgetown University have identified a new treatment for cervical cancer — a drug that is used to treat malaria.
Read the full story at NPR.org.
In an effort to help surgeons identify and remove brain tumors, scientists have developed a paint that is attracted to specific channels on cancerous cells. The hope is that with this paint, doctors can more accurately remove just the tumor and not any healthy brain tissue. By sparing the surrounding healthy brain tissue, patients will have fewer symptoms after surgery. Read more at NPR’s coverage: Why Painting Tumors Could Make Brain Surgeons Better
Illustration by Stuart Bradford. Source: New York Times website.
How far would you go to avoid getting a certain type of cancer? How far would you go to avoid getting it again? In Facing Cancer, a Stark Choice, New York Times writer Tara Parker-Pope talks about the dramatic increase in women with breast cancer or at risk of breast cancer seeking to have healthy breasts removed. Commentator Jeanne from Ohio suggests that cosmetics are also a factor.
The New York Times summarizes two recent papers on melanomas, the most dangerous type of skin cancer, that provide strong evidence that such cancers start not with mutations in genes, but mutations in the DNA regions that control them. The vast majority of our human genetic code comprises of these and other non-coding regions of DNA; what was once dismissed as mostly ‘junk DNA’ might be better called ‘dark matter’, considering how much we still have to learn about their function.
Caption via New York Times: “Tiny magnetic beads force the larger T-cells to divide before they are infused into the patient.” (Photo: University of Pennsylvania)
The HIV virus causes AIDS, one of the top ten causes of death worldwide. It is also the surprising key to a new cancer treatment with revolutionary promise. The New York Times tells the story.