Cancer Research
Low levels of testosterone may increase the long-term risk of death in men over 50 years old, according to researchers with the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.
"The new study is only the second report linking deficiency of this sex hormone with increased death from all causes, over time, and the first to do so in relatively healthy men who are living in the community," said Gail Laughlin, Ph.D., assistant professor and study author.
Laughlin will present the findings to The Endocrine Society Tuesday June 5th, 2007.…
Ghost pains, it seems. Why do some people still feel discomfort long after their injuries have healed?
The definitive answer -- and an effective treatment -- has long eluded scientists. Traditional analgesic drugs, such as aspirin and morphine derivatives, haven’t worked very well.
A Northwestern University researcher has found a key source of chronic pain appears to be an old memory trace that essentially gets stuck in the prefrontal cortex, the site of emotion and learning. The brain seems to remember the injury as if it were fresh and can’t forget it.
With new understanding of the pain…
The discovery of how some abnormal cells can avoid a biochemical program of self-destruction by increasing their energy level and repairing the damage, is giving investigators at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital insights into a key strategy cancer cells use to survive and thrive.
The finding offers an explanation of how abnormal cells that have cheated death once by disabling the main suicide pathway called apoptosis can also foil a backup self-destruct program, which allows them to survive and become cancerous.
The St. Jude study also suggests that a drug that disrupts a cancer cell’s…
Researchers have identified novel genetic mutations that are linked to hereditary diffuse gastric cancer, with these mutations being due to both independent mutational events and common ancestry, according to a study in the June 6 issue of JAMA.
Gastric cancer is the second most common cause of cancer death worldwide. There are two major variants of this cancer: an intestinal type and a diffuse type. "A decline in the overall incidence of gastric cancer can be attributed primarily to a decrease of the intestinal variant of gastric cancer with the diffuse type remaining stable or possibly…
A drug described by some people as a “genius pill” for enhancing cognitive function provided relief to a small group of Rochester breast cancer survivors who were coping with a side effect known as “chemo-brain,” according to a University of Rochester Medical Center study.
Sixty-eight women, who had completed treatment for breast cancer, participated in an eight-week clinical trial testing the effects of modafinil (Provigil). All women took the drug for the first four weeks. During the next month half of the women continued to receive the drug while the other half took an identical looking…
Malignant melanoma is one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer. Nearly 60,000 new cases of melanoma are expected in 2007, and 8,100 deaths are expected to occur.
Higher levels of a protein called S-100 in patients with melanoma may correlate with a higher risk of having the disease return, say researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.
The study evaluated and tested serum samples from 103 patients who were treated with high-dose interferon, a standard immunotherapy treatment for melanoma, an average of eight years prior. The disease recurred in 64 of the patients…
In the first scientific study of its kind, shark cartilage extract, AE-941 or Neovastat, has shown no benefit as a therapeutic agent when combined with chemotherapy and radiation for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer, according to researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.
Lung cancer is the leading cancer killer in both men and women; according to the American Cancer Society, more than 213,380 will be diagnosed in 2007 and more than 160,390 will die from the disease. Non-small cell is the most common type of the disease, accounting for about 80…
A unique examination of one treatment center’s use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in new breast cancer patients has found MRI to be superior to mammography in finding additional tumors in a breast in which cancer has already been diagnosed, and in detecting new tumors in a patient’s supposedly healthy breast.
Two studies conducted by oncologists from Mayo Clinic (http://cancercenter.mayo.edu/) in Jacksonville, Fla., and presented June 2, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (http://www.asco.org/portal/site/ASCO) (ASCO), also revealed distinct patterns…
Rats with erectile dysfunction, or ED, that were injected with a gene therapy vector containing either of two nerve growth factors were able to regain normal function after four weeks, according to a study conducted by University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers.
ED is the repeated inability to achieve or maintain an erection necessary for sexual intercourse. Because of the variability of symptoms, estimates of the incidence of ED vary but range from 15 million to 30 million affected men in the United States. ED is frequently associated with damage to the cavernous nerve that…
Last year, a groundbreaking international project found that a group of Japanese patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer survived longer —and had a higher rate of side effects — than U.S. patients with the same diagnosis,.when both groups were given two well-known drugs for the disease.
Now, a follow-up study suggests the reasons appear to lie in subtle variations in certain genes that govern how the body metabolizes chemotherapy drugs. David Gandara, M.D., a University of California, Davis researcher who led the recent Southwest Oncology Group study, will present the results…