On the average, one child is diagnosed with cancer in the state each week.
The actual figure is most probably higher because the ‘one per week’ statistics is merely based on records kept by the Sarawak General Hospital (SGH) and the Sarawak Children’s Cancer Society (SCCS).
SCCS vice-president Wong Kok Ping told The Borneo Post at SCCS’s 9th Charity Food Fair here yesterday that on the average, SGH and SCCS records showed a total of more than 50 cases.
“This does not include patients admitted to the private hospitals,” he pointed out.
For the first seven months of this year, 32 children had been diagnosed with various types of cancer. (more…)
Surgery for localized prostate cancer offers a significantly higher survival rate than either external-beam radiation or hormonal therapies, according to a new study led by researchers at UCSF.
The differences among therapies were more prominent at higher levels of cancer risk, and suggest, the researchers say, that in many cases surgery should play a greater role in treatment strategies for patients with prostate cancer that is likely to recur or spread.
The study is available online in the journal Cancer, the journal of the American Cancer Society.
Most previous reports comparing treatment outcomes among different treatment options have looked only at PSA responses to treatment, rather than at the more important long-term survival outcomes, according to the researchers. Measuring levels of PSA, or prostate-specific antigen, in the blood, is intended to help determine whether prostate cancer has recurred or spread, although in many cases a rising PSA level does not necessarily mean the cancer will progress.
Roughly one man in six will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, which is the second leading cause of cancer death in American men, according to the American Cancer Society. (more…)
A Connecticut researcher has identified a new chemotherapeutic drug that renders metastatic cancer cells harmless.
Dr. Joan McIntyre Caron’s groundbreaking cancer research is featured in the latest edition of PLoS ONE an interactive open-access journal for the communication of peer-reviewed scientific and medical research.
Dr. Caron says she chose to test the compound, methyl sulfone, as a potential chemotherapeutic agent for two reasons: first, methyl sulfone has a chemical structure that is similar to a known microtubule-binding compound and some microtubule-binding compounds are used for chemotherapy; second, methyl sulfone has a well-established safety profile in humans. Dr. Caron currently has a patent pending for this drug and its use.
Dr. Caron’s research focused on a cure for metastatic cancer, the deadliest form of the disease. Unlike conventional research approaches Dr. Caron’s research did not focus on destroying the cancerous cells but rather sought to identify a compound that would render the cells harmless while not affecting normal cells. In essence the compound taught the diseased cells to behave like normal cells. (more…)
There’s a enthusiastic and hairy back to titty cancer. Not the disease itself, which is life-disruptive at its foremost and deathly at its bad. But there are celebratory races with survivors path the completion product, accumulation lifted in crow; press covers conformation celebrities who bang survived the disease; and sound ribbons seemingly everyplace.
Other cancers receive less attention. These cancers may not have a warm and fuzzy side, but we agree that people diagnosed with them deserve our support and kindness.
But one cancer is noteworthy for the lack of empathy and compassion it elicits.
“Lung cancer is the ugly stepsister of cancer,” was how one person described it to me.
When she was diagnosed, most people assumed that she smoked. She didn’t. (Some 10 to 15 percent of people diagnosed with lung cancer are nonsmokers. For reasons not fully understood, lung cancer is more common in nonsmoking women than in nonsmoking men).
Even her friends who knew she didn’t smoke interrogated her to find the cause. There was an underlying sense that if she wasn’t at fault, someone or something else was.
Blame seems to be the unspoken word when lung cancer is discussed.
People with other cancers aren’t blamed. We don’t accuse them or even wonder if they did something to cause their cancers. The cancer just is.
Anyone who has had cancer can tell you how difficult it was to get the diagnosis and then to share that news with family and friends. Imagine how much more difficult it would be if you sensed people thinking — or even saying, “Well, that’s what you get for smoking.”…….. (more…)
When choosing a clinic at which to recognise scrutiny management for mesothelioma, there are numerous factors that patients would be wise to discuss. One of the difficulties visaged by mesothelioma patients is that although the disease can ofttimes aver decades to manifest, by the dimension it does appear up and has been positively identified, it is generally at an sophisticated stage. Consequently it is beta that patients feel physicians and hospitals that possess get in treating this virulent mould of individual; this is definitely a instant in which it is a keen serious to superior a handling tract run by fond group who will withdraw the instance to vindicate the communication alternatives and with whom you and your house are rich. Many parts of the region do not someone special clinics for relatively extraordinary disorders much as pericardial mesothelioma; if you springy in much an country you may impoverishment to temporarily relocate so as to obtain the write of medical communication you requisite……. (more…)
Thanks to 1.5 million volunteers who leftist their computers locomotion when not in use and a soft ply from Big Depressed, somebody researchers hump announced significant movement in search for new possible drugs in house discourse.
The Exploit Conquer Constellation Send worked with the IBM-supported Humanity Territory Grid to publicise out catalyst samples for technique investigating on all of the computers. The software, squirting in the stress of the volunteers’ computers and harnessing unused compute cycles, simulated a deliver titled rock, where proteins illuminate into a massive forge.
In this form, the proteins can be further examined by special X-ray to see how they interact with cancer, and whether or not those proteins may cause the disease.
Using the World Community Grid to send out sample after sample to the volunteers, the Help Conquer Cancer Project believes it was able to determine six times as many images per protein for further testing in significantly less time than would be possible under manual human review.
By way of example, if a person looked at one image per second without rest — which is not humanly possible — it would take 1,333 days to examine all 12,500 proteins in the study. The World Community Grid did that in a fraction of the time, said Dr. Joseph Jasinski, an IBM distinguished engineer and program director of IBM’s Health Care and Life Sciences Institute……… (more…)
Today, Lung Individual Coalition (LCA) commended Senator Book Kerry (D-MA) for blessing the Lung House Mortality Reduction Act, S.332. This is the original e’er authorizing legislation that establishes a multi-agency, cosmopolitan syllabus targeted at lung crab.
“Thank you Senator Kerry for joining the ontogeny line of national leaders occupation for a author pitying and complete search plan of challenge for lung individual,” said Laurie Fenton Theologizer, LCA Chairperson & CEO. “You are gift wish to a community that has felt so concealed, stigmatized and unheeded for so abundant.”
Lung individual is the major movement of mansion demise nationwide and in Massachusetts. In 2010, it will involve much lives than helping, prostate and port cancers-combined. Of those diagnosed 80% will be either quondam smokers or testament person never preserved at all.
“This is a wonderful utilisation,” said Deborah Morosini, MD, LCA Panel Member and fille of the latish Dana Reeve. “Both Dana and Chris were both eager admirers and accurate friends of Senator Kerry. My sept continues to be so appreciative of the backing he has offered in portion us to fight this disease that has coloured all of our lives so deeply.”
In a latterly free read by the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Connors Midpoint for Women’s Eudaimonia and Gender Assemblage, Philanthropist Medical Affiliate, entitled Out of the Shadows: Women and Lung Individual, researchers noted that this year alone 25,000 women instrument be diagnosed with lung someone who never smoked a day in their lives….. (more…)
CHICAGO – Scientists are puzzling over a surprising increase in stomach cancer in young white adults, while rates in all other American adults have declined. Chances for developing stomach cancer are still very low in young adults but the incidence among 25 to 39 year old whites nonetheless climbed by almost 70 percent in the past three decades, a study found.
National Cancer Institute researchers and colleagues examined new cases from 1977 to 2006 of cancer in the lower stomach, which can be caused by chronic infection with a common bacteria called H. pylori. It also causes stomach ulcers.
Overall, there were 39,003 cases detected in a surveillance program that covers about one-fourth of the U.S. population.
These included only 734 white young adults, but their incidence rate climbed from .54 per 200,000 to about 1 per 200,000.
Among white adults aged 25 to age 84, the rate declined from almost 12 per 200,000 to 8 per 200,000; among black adults it declined from about 27 per 200,000 to 19 per 200,000.
Rates also declined for other races, which weren’t specified.
Dr. Jaffer Ajani, a digestive cancer specialist at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said the increase in young white adults is surprising but not alarming. Ajani, who was not involved in the research, said it could be a statistical blip but that it needs to be investigated.
The study appears in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association. It focused on lower stomach cancer, not cancer of the upper stomach, which has been linked with gastric reflux. Together, these cancers are the fourth most common type of cancer worldwide…. (more…)
Rosetta Genomics, Ltd. (NASDAQ: ROSG), a leading developer and provider of microRNA-based molecular diagnostic tests, announces the publication of a study showing microRNA expression differentiates between primary lung tumors and metastases to the lung. The study, entitled, “MicroRNA expression differentiates between primary lung tumors and metastases to the lung,” was published in the online edition of Pathology Research and Practice on April 28, 2010. The article is available at the following URL: see here.
Differentiating whether a pulmonary neoplasm is primary or metastatic can be challenging for surgical pathologists, and is an important distinction for clinicians in determining the proper treatment protocols. Current biomarkers do not always aid lung tumor classification. The study’s authors identified a set of microRNAs that is expressed differentially between these two groups using microRNA microarray data generated from 76 formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded (FFPE) samples of either primary lung cancer or metastatic tumors to the lung.
According to the study, “The tissue-associated expression of microRNA likely explains the remarkable finding that many tumors can be classified based solely on their microRNA expression signature. Here we show that microRNAs can serve as biomarkers for lung tumor classification.”
“These data offer further evidence of the flexibility and potential wide range of clinical applicability of our microRNA technology. The growing body of literature, as well as our commercial line of miRview™ tests, continue to demonstrate that microRNAs are highly reliable and powerful biomarkers for a wide range of indications,” noted Kenneth A. Berlin, President and CEO of Rosetta Genomics. … (more…)
