There are two numbers blazoned on the new bike Lance Armstrong will ride in the Tour Down Under and the American sporting legend and cancer campaigner says they sum up the reasons for his return to professional cycling.
The first – 1,274 – refers to the number of days between when the Texan retired at the end of the 2005 Tour de France and the start of his comeback in Adelaide.
While the second – 27.5 – refers to the estimated millions of cancer deaths worldwide in that time.
“So in those 1,274 days approximately 27.4 million people around the world have died from this disease,” Armstrong said on Saturday.
Using some mouthwash brands can increase the risk of getting mouth cancer, a new study claims.
Rinsing with mouthwash containing alcohol makes it easier for cancer-causing substances like nicotine to penetrate the lining of the mouth, says the report’s author, Professor Michael McCullough.
More than 3,000 people were examined for the research, giving ‘sufficient evidence’ that using mouthwash is linked to the development of oral cancer.
The mammogram has suffered a lot of setbacks in recent years. Breast cancer researchers have questioned the value of the screening test in women younger than 50 and berated the X-ray for its high rate of false positives, those suspicious-looking abnormalities that turn out to be benign. Now, the test itself takes another hit, though women may actually benefit from the news in the end. Some tumors that mammography accurately diagnoses, it seems, may not need treatment. According to a study published in yesterday’s Archives of Internal Medicine, a fraction of the tumors it detects would vanish on their own.
Examining subnetworks of genetic activity in a patient’s tumor better predicts the spread of breast cancer than conventional techniques, researchers say.
University of California at San Diego scientists, working with Korean researchers, used bioinformatic algorithms to identify these subnetworks. They then mapped the gene activity to the many networks of signaling pathways and protein complexes that prior research had found in human cells.
While a colonoscopy is a very effective procedure for combating colorectal cancer, it may not be quite as good as previously thought, a new study suggests.
The procedure does a good job of detecting early signs of disease on the left side of the colon, or large intestine, but is not as effective at spotting potential problems of the right side of the organ. This means a colonoscopy’s success at preventing colorectal cancer deaths seems to lie with its ability to uncover so-called “left-sided” problems.
Expression of the microtubule-binding protein Tau is not a reliable means of selecting breast cancer patients for adjuvant paclitaxel chemotherapy, according to research led by The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.
Presented Dec. 13, at the CRTC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, the researchers found that Tau expression does predict survival, yet in an unexpected way.
Shares in biotechnology company Exelixis Inc. rose nearly 33 percent Friday on news that major pharmaceutical firm Bristol-Myers Squibb will collaborate on the development of two experimental cancer drugs discovered through Exelixis’ automated screening process.
The South San Francisco biotech company will receive an initial payment of $195 million from Bristol-Myers under the partnership terms, followed by $45 million in 2009.
SAN ANTONIO — As a percentage of family income, money spent by U.S. women with breast cancer is much greater for low-income patients than for those who are well off, according to research presented December 12 in Texas at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.
Public health researcher Lisa Lines of the consulting firm Boston Health Economics in Waltham, Mass., and her colleagues analyzed expenditures made by 806 breast cancer patients from 1996 to 2005. Out-of-pocket costs included insurance premiums, payments to meet deductibles, co-pays and any other payments made to meet medical or drug costs associated with treatment.
Selenium, vitamin E and vitamin C won’t prevent men from getting prostate cancer.
In findings that were released early because of the public health implications, the results of two large randomized, controlled clinical trials showed the supplements failed to provide a cancer-prevention benefit, despite past findings that seemed to indicate great promise — particularly for selenium. Both studies were expected to be published in the Jan. 7 print issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“Our results showed no evidence of benefit from selenium and vitamin E on prostate cancer and other cancers,” said the lead author of one of the studies, Dr. Scott Lippman, a professor of medicine in the division of cancer medicine at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston.
Lippman’s study, known as the SELECT trial, included more than 35,000 men. Black men included in the study were all over 50, and men from other races were all over 55. (Blacks have a higher risk of developing prostate cancer than do men of other races, according to the American Cancer Society.)
The men were randomly assigned to one of four groups: selenium; vitamin E; selenium and vitamin E; or a placebo. The average follow-up time was more than five years.
The researchers found no statistically significant difference between the groups, and the trial was ended early, because there was no convincing evidence of efficacy.
The second study, done by Harvard researchers, included almost 15,000 male physicians over 50 who were randomly assigned to receive vitamin E, vitamin C, or a placebo. The average follow-up time for this trial was eight years.
Again, no statistically significant benefits were found from either vitamin C or E when it came to preventing prostate and other cancers.
These studies are just the latest in a long list of recent research that’s been discounting the use of individual vitamins and supplements for chemoprevention. Other recent studies have suggested that vitamins, B, C, D, E, folic acid and calcium taken alone, or in various combinations, aren’t effective for cancer prevention.
“Single-agent interventions, even in combinations, may be an ineffective approach to primary prevention in average-risk populations,” wrote Dr. Peter Gann, the author of an accompanying editorial in the same issue of the journal.
Andrew Shao, vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs for the Center for Responsible Nutrition in Washington, D.C., said he thought researchers need to “redefine our expectations for nutrients. They’re not magic bullets, though they do have tangible effects.”
Shao said studies that look at vitamins and cancer prevention tend to treat vitamins the same way they would a targeted pharmaceutical agent. But, he said, “the whole body is affected by nutrients, while pharmaceuticals are highly specialized and targeted to specific cells.”
“It would be a mistake to look at one trial that answers a very specific question and say these nutrients don’t work at all,” said Shao.
Lippman, however, said he doesn’t recommend the use of supplements for cancer prevention. “There’s no evidence to support taking these,” he said.
Cancer is on pace to supplant heart disease as the No. 1 cause of death worldwide in 2010, with a growing burden in poor countries thanks to more cigarette smoking and other factors, global health experts said on Tuesday.
Globally, an estimated 12.4 million people will be diagnosed with some form of cancer this year and 7.6 million people will die, the U.N. World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer said in a report.
“The global cancer burden doubled in the last 30 years of the 20th century, and it is estimated that this will double again between 2000 and 2020 and nearly triple by 2030,” according to the report.
By 2030, 26.4 million people a year may be diagnosed with cancer, with 17 million people dying from it, the report forecast.
In men, lung cancer was the most common form in terms of new cases and deaths, while breast cancer was the most common type among women in new cases and deaths, according to the report. More men than women get cancer and die from it.
“This is going to present amazing problems at every level in every society worldwide,” the IARC’s Peter Boyle said at a news conference.
In the near term, cancer is expected to bypass heart disease as the leading killer globally in 2010, American Cancer Society Chief Executive Officer John Seffrin said. Cancer currently accounts for about one in eight deaths worldwide.
Trends that will contribute to rising cancer cases and deaths include the aging of populations in many countries — cancer is more common in the elderly — and increasing rates of cigarette smoking in poor countries.
Some rich countries have made progress in cutting cigarette smoking, which causes most cases of lung cancer as well as many other illnesses. In the United States, the most recent figures show that for the first time since records have been kept less than 20 percent of adults were smokers in 2007.
However, cigarette companies are finding new customers in developing countries. Seffrin noted that 40 percent of the world’s smokers live in just two nations — China and India.
Decades ago, cancer was considered largely a problem of Westernized, rich, industrialized countries. But much of the global burden now rests in poor and medium-income countries.
Many of these countries have limited health budgets and high rates of communicable diseases, while cancer treatment facilities are out of reach for many people and life-saving treatments are seldom available, Boyle said.
“There are more deaths in the world from cancer than from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined,” Boyle said.
At the same time, progress against cancer has been reported by authorities in such places as the United States and Europe.
For example, health authorities in the United States reported last month that cancer diagnosis rates are now dropping for the first time in both men and women and previous declines in cancer death rates are accelerating.
