It is recommended to eat 5 servings of fruits and vegetable a day. A clinical study of women who ate twice as much as the recommended servings found that both groups had about the same in long term breast cancer survival.
The results were not what the researchers expected, as they thought the extra nutrients would improve the body’s ability to fight off recurrence of breast cancer. The extensive study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
During the early 1900’s, Dr. William Coley learned something that seemed to be a very effective cancer treatment. By infecting tumors with the Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria, he found that the body’s immune system eventually killed off the tumors.
He began treating his cancer patients by injecting the bacteria directly into tumors, and found that the treatment was quite succesful, particularly when the treatment resulted in recurring fevers.
Today, radiation treatment is a preferred method, possibly because Coley’s superior’s at the time believed that radiation treatment could be improved to become a more successful cancer treatment.
Today, the Cancer Research institute, founded by Coley’s daughter, carries on the research.
Sources:
For those who dare to think about it, it’s one of those phrases that you dread hearing. For some it comes as a complete surprise, and for others, they may have seen it coming. But it is always difficult to take, and it helps a lot to read about others’ experiences when they hear those words….
You have cancer…
Journalist Leroy Sievers heard it back in early 2006, and he’s been documenting his thoughts and reflections ever since. From his first post:
“Then a while ago, I noticed I was slurring my words. One side of my face began to droop. I finally ended up in the emergency room for a brain scan. When I was being wheeled back into the ER, I caught the eye of the doctor, and I knew. I’d seen that look once before.”
“Four years ago, I came to after a routine colonoscopy to see my doctor’s face, and I knew then, too. Cancer. So, I had surgery and had been clean for four years. I was the poster child for early detection and treatment. Until now.”
“Sure enough, there was a mass in my brain. A brain tumor, and the next day, another body blow: lung cancer. I pushed my doctor for the worst-case scenario, so he gave it to me. Six months.”
Read more on the NPR website blog called My Cancer.
A therapy that temporarily shuts down the ovaries could protect the fertility of women with cancer who are undergoing chemotherapy, say researchers.
Australian scientists used a drug to turn off a hormonal "switch" in the brain that triggers ovulation.
Once the woman’s chemotherapy has ended, the drug is stopped and the ovaries switch back on with their store of eggs in tact.
Source: BBC News (7/4/07)
Doctors at a San Francisco Bay Area hospital are now in phase three clinical trials of GVAX, a prostate cancer vaccine developed by Cell Genesys, Inc. (CEGE)
While vaccines are commonly thought of as a preventive measure, they may also be used to treat an existing disease. Dr. Ari Baron, an oncologist from California Pacific Medical Center is leading the clinical trial on the GVAX prostate vaccine.
According to ABC news, Dr. Baron explains how the vaccine is placed just under the skin to trigger an immune response: "White blood cells in your skin see these foreign cells. They’re stimulated then to respond to them, if you will, and train your immune system to make perhaps antibodies or t-cells against the prostate cancer." GVAX is specifically designed for metastatic prostate cancer.
Dr. Baron says that early data have been promising, and the current Phase 3 trials will provide additional data to determine how effective the vaccine is in treating prostate cancer. California Pacific Medical Center is recruiting patients for its clinical trials.
Source: AB News/KGO TV (7/7/07)
Breast-cancer patients carrying two well-known genes linked to the disease have the same survival chances as noncarriers of the genes who develop the disease, according to a study by Israeli and Canadian researchers.
The study was aimed in part at shedding light on whether breast-cancer treatment should be tailored differently for women with the two gene mutations, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2. The results provided no decisive answers on that question, but could provide some comfort to carriers who might feel the odds stacked against them.
Asian-Americans, both those born here and new immigrants, have distinctive patterns of cancer incidence that doctors should consider when treating them, researchers have found.
A report appearing today in the journal CA is “one of the most comprehensive summaries of cancer among Asian-Americans,” according to the American Cancer Society, which publishes the journal.
The experimental drug abiraterone, which prevents testosterone production anywhere in the body, may reduce blood levels of the prostate cancer marker prostate-specific antigen (PSA) by half, new research shows.
The study also found that the drug can shrink tumors in men whose prostate cancer has continued to grow despite treatment.
Five years ago, scientists at Wake Forest University School of Medicine were surprised to find the drug orlistat (Xenical or Alli) could kill cancer cells. Now, they report on how it works. The drug binds and interacts with a protein found in tumor cells, blocking its function and causing the cells to die.
Researches point out that Orlistat alone can not treat cancer, as it can act only in the digestive tract in humans. However, a greater understanding of how Orlistat functions with cancer cells may help in the development of a drug like orlistat that can go through the bloodstream to the site of the tumor.
U.S. researchers are launching a phase I clinical trial to test an engineered measles virus against the bone marrow cancer multiple myeloma.