According to recent reports, scientists have found two new genetic links to breast cancer.
Although one gene appears to raise the risk by as much as 23%, the other mutation seems to have a beneficial protective effect by lowering the risk by up to 11%.
The recent findings have now raised the list to 13 known genetic variants that alter breast cancer risk.
Researchers have compared suspected regions of over 40,000 women with breast cancer and 40,000 women not affected by the disease.
Scientists were then able to spot particular regions or “loci” of DNA that affect risk.
Experts say that “This study brings us a step closer to creating a powerful genetic test for breast cancer.”
http://smartabouthealth.net/
Two Genetic Links to Breast Cancer Discovered
New Drugs For Prostate Cancer
Of the first 30 patients treated with MDV3100, 13 showed declines of more than 50 percent in the levels of chemicals in the blood that indicate the presence of the cancer.
However, the tests are only in phase 1 and 2, where drugs are checked for safety, side effects and early indications of effectiveness. The drug still faces a larger phase 3 tests of effectiveness before it can be proposed for use.
The preliminary findings, by a team led by Charles L. Sawyers of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, are reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
Dr Sawyer said the results so far were 'very impressive' and could eventually lead to the disease being eliminated.
The treatment is for prostate cancer that has spread to other areas of the body.
Men with these cancers are often treated with drugs that inhibit the activity of male hormones, which can drive tumour growth. But tumours can become resistant to those drugs.
The new drug binds to receptors for the male hormones and increases the body's ability to fight cancerous cells, the researchers report.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Smoking and Niccotine
Tobacco smoke contains more than 4,000 chemicals. At least 400 are poisonous and more than 50 are cancer-causing. Examples of harmful chemicals in cigarette are nicotine, tar, carbon monoxide, arsenic, cadmium, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide, DDT, acetone, formaldehyde, naphthalene, polonium-210 and vinyl chloride.
Nicotine Poisoning
Nicotine is one of the most lethal poisons known. Nicotine is found in cigars, cigarettes, loose tobacco (Ang Hoon & bidis), shisha,, chewing tobacco and cigarette butts. It is also found in pesticide.
Ingestion of nicotine can cause nicotine poisoning. Severity and manifestation of symptoms depends on the form and amount of nicotine ingested. Symptoms usually begin within 30 to 90 minutes. If in liquid form, symptoms may appear in as little as 15 to 30 minutes.
Infants and children are especially sensitive to nicotine. Eating one or more cigarettes, three or more cigarette butts, or more than one pinch of snuff is considered potentially toxic or poisonous to children.
Nicotine poisoning causes dizziness, nausea or vomiting, stomach pain, weakness and increased drooling. In more severe cases, it may cause abnormal blood pressure or heartbeat, slowed or interrupted breathing, general sluggishness, seizures and coma.
Long-term impact of smoking or inhaling environmental tobacco smoke
Smoking or passive-smoking (secondhand smoke) can cause cancers of the lung, mouth, throat, esophagus, stomach, pancreas, kidney, bladder and cervix, heart attacks, stroke, high blood pressure, blood vessel disease and chronic lung diseases (bronchitis and emphysema). In pregnant woman, the chemicals from cigarette may get pass from the mother into the baby’s blood and increases the risk of stillbirth and underweight or premature birth.
http://dpic.sgh.com.sg/
Different Types Of Lung Cancer From Woman
Lung cancer is a different disease in women than it is in men, researchers have said.
The female hormone oestrogen is partly to blame, according to a team at Northwestern University, Illinois.
Rates of lung cancer in women have increased significantly in recent decades while those for men have remained stable.
The research in the Journal of the American Medical Association also noted the effect of more women smoking.
Female smokers have a greater chance of developing lung cancer, and a higher risk of developing adenocarcinoma, which is the most common form of the disease.
But women also have better survival rates, the researchers said.
Numbers of women smoking continue to increase, while rates among men are falling.
Between 1990 and 2003 there was a 60% increase in lung cancer cases among women in the US. An estimated 68,500 American women will die from the disease this year.
The team at Northwestern University, and colleagues at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, looked at previous research into lung cancer and found evidence that the differences in disease rates and survival could in part be due to oestrogen.
Studies have shown lung cancer cells have more oestrogen receptors on their surface than normal lung cells.
Therapy
Other research has indicated a link between oestrogen replacement therapy and adenocarcinoma and an interaction with smoking.
Dr Jyoti Patel, an oncologist at the university, said: "Lung cancer appears to be a different disease in women.
"Mounting evidence suggests that these differences could be due, in part, to oestrogen.
"Genetic, metabolic and hormonal factors all are important to the way women react to carcinogens and lung cancer."
The researchers said women reacted better to some targeted therapies and they were now trying to work out why that was.
Professor Michael Seckl, professor of cancer medicine at Imperial College London, has researched the role of oestrogen and found a possible link in lung cancer patients.
He said the conclusion that the hormone was partly to blame for women's different rates of disease and survival was a "plausible interpretation".
Professor Seckl added: "It is hardly surprising - men and women are very different.
"The message needs to get out there that lung cancer is not just a male disease. Women do appear to be more at risk of lung cancer."
Far more research into lung cancer was needed, he said, as it currently gets only 3% of cancer research money in the UK though it is the form of the disease that kills the most people.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
Drinking daily May Increases Cancer To Woman
Downing as little as one alcoholic drink a day seems to increase a woman's risk for developing cancer, according to a British study that looked at nearly 1.3 million middle-aged women.
The study in Tuesday's issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute suggested the cancer risks of alcohol may outweigh any potential benefits it has on the heart.
"These findings suggest that even low levels of drinking increase a woman's risk of developing cancer of the breast, liver and rectum — and in smokers, cancers of the mouth and throat," Naomi Allen of the University of Oxford, who led the study, said in a statement.
Low to moderate alcohol consumption may account for nearly 13 per cent of the cancers studied in Britain, the researchers said.
Women in the study had one alcoholic drink per day, which is typical of consumption in developed countries. About 25 per cent of the participants said they abstained. Nearly all the others reported fewer than three drinks a day.
The researchers compared the lightest consumers who had two or fewer drinks a week to those who drank the most.
The type of alcohol — whether wine, beer or liquor — did not change the link.
Participants were asked about their drinking habits while they visited breast cancer screening clinics. With an average followup time of more than seven years, 68,775 women were diagnosed with cancer.
Each additional alcoholic drink regularly consumed per day was associated with:
* 11 additional breast cancers per 1,000 women up to age 75.
* One additional cancer of the oral cavity and pharynx.
* One additional cancer of the rectum.
* An increase of 0.7 each for esophageal, laryngeal, and liver cancers.
For these cancers combined, there was an excess of about 15 cancers per 1,000 women per drink per day. That compares with the background incidence for these cancers of an estimated 118 per 1,000 women in developed countries, the researchers said.
"Although the magnitude of the excess absolute risk associated with one additional drink per day may appear small for some cancer sites, the high prevalence of moderate alcohol drinking among women in many populations means that the proportion of cancers attributable to alcohol is an important public health issue," the study's authors wrote.
No safe level
The message is clear, agreed Michael Lauer and Paul Sorlie of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in the United States.
"There is no level of alcohol consumption that can be considered safe," Lauer and Sorlie wrote in a journal commentary.
The observation is not a new one, but it's not a message that people want to hear, said Dr. Kathy Pritchard, an oncologist and head of clinical trials and epidemiology at Toronto's Sunnybrook Regional Cancer Centre.
The reason alcohol is a risk factor is it affects your liver. Both men and women who drink alcohol have more estrogen in their system, Prichard said.
In the U.S., guidelines recommend that women consume no more than one drink a day and two a day for men.
"You have to balance all those things out," said Dr. Philip Brooks, who researches alcohol and cancer at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. "This kind of information is important for people to know and to consult with their physician about the various risk factors they have."
http://www.cbc.ca
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