Cancer Research
The advent of online social networks has led to the rapid development of tools for understanding the interactions between members of the network, their activity, the connections, the hubs and nodes. Science 2.0 was founded with that as one of its four pillars. But any relationship between lots of entities, be it users of Facebook or the genes and proteins in our bodies, can be analyzed with the same tools.
Now a paper shows how social network analysis can be used to understand and identify the biomarkers in our bodies for diseases, including different types of cancer.
Tansel Özyer, Serkan…
Researchers have discovered that a rabbit virus can deliver a one-two punch, killing some kinds of cancer cells while eliminating a common and dangerous complication of bone marrow transplants. For patients with blood cancers such as leukemia and multiple myeloma, a bone marrow transplant can be both curative and perilous. It replenishes marrow lost to disease or chemotherapy but raises the risk that newly transplanted white blood cells will attack the recipient's body.
Now researchers say the myxoma virus, found in rabbits, can do double duty, quelling the unwanted side effects of a bone…
Women aged 50-69 years who attend mammography screening reduce their risk of dying from breast cancer by 40 percent compared to women who are not screened - according to a major international review of the latest evidence on breast cancer screening. Overall, women who are invited to attend mammography screening have a 23 percent risk reduction in breast cancer death (owing to some attending and some not), compared with women not invited by routine screening programs.
In the UK, this relative risk translates to around eight deaths prevented per 1,000 women regularly attending screening, and…
Cancer has overtaken cardiovascular disease, which includes heart disease and stroke, as the UK's No 1 killer--but only among men, reveals research published online in the journal Heart.
Cardiovascular disease is still the most common cause of death among women, and kills more young women than breast cancer, the figures show.
The researchers used the latest nationally available data (2012-13) for each of the four UK countries and the Cardiovascular Disease Statistics 2014 report compiled for the British Heart Foundation (BHF) to quantify the prevalence of cardiovascular disease, and find out…
Esophageal cancer rates in men have increased by 50 percent since the early 1980s, with new United Kingdom cases reaching almost 6,000, according to the latest figures which show that the number of men diagnosed with esophageal cancer has rapidly risen from around 2,700 cases three decades ago to 5,740 cases in 2012.
Given the changes in population size this equates to a 50 percent increase from 15 to 23 cases per 100,000 people. In women, the increase is much smaller with around 10 percent more now developing the disease compared to the 80s. Now 2,802 women are diagnosed with esophageal…
A new study found that esophageal cancer patients treated with proton therapy experienced significantly less toxic side effects than patients treated with older radiation therapies.
The researchers looked at nearly 600 patients and compared two kinds of X-ray radiation with proton therapy, which targets tumors while minimizing harm to surrounding tissues. found that proton therapy resulted in a significantly lower number of side effects, including nausea, blood abnormalities and loss of appetite.
"This evidence underscores the precision of proton therapy, and how it can…
Prostate cancer is the second most common type of cancer in men and is predicted to result in an estimated 220,00 cases in the United States in 2015.
In recent years, emphasis has been placed on chemoprevention - the use of agents to prevent the development or progression of prostate cancer - and toward that goal a team of researchers led by Nagi B. Kumar, Ph.D., R.D., F.A.D.A. at Moffitt Cancer Center recently published results of a randomized trial that assessed the safety and effectiveness of the active components in green tea to prevent prostate cancer development in men who have pre-…
More than 500,000 people in the United States die each year of cancer-related causes and a new study has identified the mechanism behind one of the most common mutations that help cancer cells replicate limitlessly.
Approximately 85 percent of cancer cells obtain their limitless replicative potential through the reactivation of a specific protein called telomerase (TERT). Recent cancer research has shown that highly recurrent mutations in the promoter of the TERT gene are the most common genetic mutations in many cancers, including adult glioblastoma and hepatocellular carcinoma.
TERT…
The United States remains mired in an economic downturn, with over 90 million unemployed and many of the employed making less than they made before 2009. The knock-on effects of the economic downturn have been explored in economy and psychology. Now researchers are examining the effects of unemployment on an even darker subject - cancer mortality.
One would think that dealing with unemployment was challenge enough. But according to the latest research published in ecancermedicalscience, rises in unemployment are associated with significant increases in prostate cancer mortality.
This is the…
A recent study concluded that low-income and uninsured women in states that are not expanding their Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid coverage are less likely to receive breast and cervical cancer screenings compared to states that are implementing expansions, even though such low income people are now given health care coverage under the ACA.
The ACA mandates health coverage for all citizens but states may now broaden Medicaid health insurance coverage for non-elderly adults to those with an annual income up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line. About half of the states have or are…