Results tagged “prevention” from Cancer

(NewsTarget) Many people have heard the saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. When it comes to cancer, this couldn’t be truer. To date several billion dollars, over 30 years have been spent on finding that elusive cure for cancer. What about cancer prevention? It is estimated that a woeful fraction of that amount of money has been spent on cancer prevention. The statistics from the Nutrition Journal state that cancer can be prevented in 30-40 percent of known cases through lifestyle factors, such as diet, exercise and maintaining a healthy body weight. The 30-40 percent stated as preventable by the Nutrition Journal, many in fact, be a conservative estimate, as suggested by many wellness practitioners. Cancer costs the US 107 billion annually. Finding a cure is costing us a great deal, but lack of prevention is costing us more.

Thousands of young women could be at risk of life-theatening cervical cancer after being excluded from the NHS screening programme, say doctors.

Regular smear tests are no longer offered to women under 25 and experts say at least 3,000 women will develop abnormalities that could result in cancer if left untreated.

A change of policy in 2004 stopped women aged 20 to 24 years from getting screening tests on the grounds it could do 'more harm than good'.

Raising vitamin D levels by taking supplements and absorbing a little bit of sunshine each day may help prevent colorectal and breast cancers, said two studies.

A high blood level of vitamin D could help reduce the risk of breast cancer by half and of colorectal cancer by two-thirds, the studies found.

Vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin that is found in food and is made in the body because sunlight's UV rays trigger vitamin D synthesis in the skin. US health authorities have not established a recommended daily allowance for the vitamin due to insufficient scientific evidence.

ATLANTA - Cancer deaths in the United States have dropped for a second straight year, confirming that a corner has been turned in the war on cancer.

After a decline of 369 deaths from 2002 to 2003, the decrease from 2003 to 2004 was 3,014 — or more than eight times greater, according to a review of U.S. death certificates by the American Cancer Society.

The drop from 2002 to 2003 was the first annual decrease in total cancer deaths since 1930. But the decline was slight, and experts were hesitant to say whether it was a cause for celebration or just a statistical fluke.

President Bush Wednesday hailed the downward trend in cancer deaths in the United States, a signal that medicine is making strides in the battling a disease that kills nearly 1,500 Americans a day.

The collaborative work being performed by professionals across medical disciplines in the promising area of molecular imaging - from research scientists to nuclear medicine physicians, urologists, radiochemists and even veterinarians - provides encouraging news in fighting prostate cancer. This type of progressive - or translational - research can be seen in two papers published in the January issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

Researchers at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., and at Nihon Medi-Physics’ research center in Chiba, Japan, collaborated closely in examining the potential of using the radiotracer FACBC to better stage or determine prostate cancer spread, said David M. Schuster, an assistant professor and director of the division of nuclear medicine and molecular imaging in Emory’s radiology department.

Scientists have identified a gene linked to the most common type of kidney cancer in children, and expressed hope this might help doctors determine which young patients are most at risk of dying.

Writing on Thursday in the journal Science, Massachusetts General Hospital researchers said about 30 percent of cases of the cancer called Wilms tumor involve mutations in a gene called WTX located on the sex-determining X chromosome.

About 90 percent of childhood kidney cancer cases are Wilms tumor. It occurs in roughly one in 10,000 children worldwide. It is treated with surgery and chemotherapy, with about 80 percent of patients surviving. It usually appears by age 5.

The disease also is called nephroblastoma.

Scientists in Taiwan have developed a simple, five-gene test aimed at showing which lung cancer patients most need chemotherapy, as similar tests now do for people with breast cancer and lymphoma.

The experimental test needs to be validated in larger groups of patients, so widespread use is perhaps a few years away. However, it's already winning praise for its possible use in everyday hospital settings instead of in limited situations by people with special genetics training.

"This has the potential to be extremely helpful," said Dr. David Johnson, a lung cancer expert at Vanderbilt University and former president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the world's largest group of cancer specialists.

by Jerome Douglas, NewsTarget

Drinking an excess of cow's milk can promote cancer growth, according to Dr. T. Collin Campbell, Emeritus professor from Cornell University. After 27 years of animal research, Dr. Campbell came to that rather surprising conclusion which he revealed in his book, "China Study."

Dr. Campbell wrote a book on diet and cancer in 1982 that shocked U.S. medical authorities, as he organized an epidemiological study in China seeking associations between diets and diseases. The New York Times called the study the "greatest in the world" of epidemiological studies.

In Dr. Campbell's experiments, two groups of rats were exposed to equally high doses of highly carcinogenic aflatoxin to induce cancer. The rats were then fed a diet either with 20 percent glutencasein from animals. After a certain period, cancer cells did not increase in rats on the gluten diet, while the number of cancer cells in the rats on the casein diet drastically increased. from plants, or 20 percent.

Healthday comes with another incompetent article which is instantly being spread over other news websites.

What their article proposes is to absolutely minimize your exposure to the sunlight. This kind of advice is worth absolutely nothing. The American Cancer Society experts are forgetting the vitalizing and healing properties of the sunlight. However, abuse of everything good and useful will result in negative reaction. Laying on the beach for hours, visiting tanning salon every two days, etc - all this is too much.

The list of advices provided by Healthday should not be applied to everyone. People with sensitive skin, with sunlight allergy, with pigment spots, over certain age - they may benefit from such information. However, this info should be already known by them.

Anyways, off to read the Health Tip: Keep Deadly Skin Cancer Away on Yahoo News.

BALTIMORE, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- Men with early prostate cancer who eat a vegetarian diet, exercise and reduce stress may lower their risk of cancer progression, says a U.S. study.

The 93 study participants were men with early-stage prostate cancer who had chosen "watchful waiting" instead of active treatment for their prostate cancer.

During the one-year study, six men in the usual care group underwent conventional treatment because of rising prostate specific antigen, known as PSA, or evidence of progression from magnetic resonance imaging. In contrast, none of the men in the comprehensive lifestyle group, who followed a very-low-fat diet of 10 percent or less of daily calories, needed treatment. PSA levels decreased 4 percent in the lifestyle group, whereas PSA levels increased 6 percent in the usual-care group.

London, Britain (AHN) - A new study by the Cancer Research U.K. at University College London found that British teen are putting their health at risk by spending more hours watching TV and playing computer games and not doing physical excercise.

The study, involving nearly 6,000 11-12 year olds from several London schools, tracked teen's physical activity and sedentary behavior over a five-year period. The study found that physical activity declined in girls by 46 percent and in boys by 23 percent over five years.

Girls increased their sedentary behavior by 2.8 hours a week while in boys the increase was 2.5 hours a week. By age 16, girls were physically active on less than two days a week and boys for just over three days a week.

A key enzyme that cuts short our cellular lifespan in an effort to thwart cancer has now been linked to body mass.

Until now, scientists believed that our relatively long lifespans controlled the expression of telomerase—an enzyme that can lengthen the lives of cells, but can also increase the rate of cancer.

Vera Gorbunova, assistant professor of biology at the University of Rochester, conducted a first-of-its-kind study to discover why some animals express telomerase while others, like humans, don't. The findings are reported in today's issue of Aging Cell.

Laura Bush's skin cancer came with a classic symptom, a slow-healing sore.

That made it hard to ignore, a good thing: Remove skin cancer early, and it's easy to cure.

Better is preventing skin cancer, and key is protecting yourself - and your children, starting when they're tots - from the sun. Sunburns early in life are considered the most dangerous.

Too few heed that advice. Skin cancer strikes over 1 million Americans annually, and is on the rise.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People who use plenty of olive oil in their diets may be helping to prevent damage to body cells that can eventually lead to cancer, new research suggests.

In a study of 182 European men, researchers found evidence that olive oil can reduce oxidative damage to cells' genetic material, a process that can initiate cancer development.

They say the findings may help explain why rates of several cancers are higher in Northern Europe than in Southern Europe, where olive oil is a dietary staple.

SAN ANTONIO, Dec. 18 -- Tamoxifen has a "true preventive effect" on breast cancer in women with a strong family history of the disease -- but it may take several years of treatment before the benefit is seen.

The finding emerged in the second decade of the long-running Royal Marsden cancer prevention study, according to Trevor Powles, Ph.D., of the Royal Marsden Hospital in London. 

Two decades after the randomized, placebo-controlled trial started, women in the tamoxifen arm, with a median follow-up of 13 years, have a significantly lower rate of estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer than those getting placebo, Dr. Powles told the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium here. 

BEIJING, Dec.14 (Xinhuanet) -- Want to be healthier? Be vegetarian, giving up delicious roast meat.

Researchers studying a group of vegetarians who'd maintained a diet relatively low in protein and calories found that they had lower blood levels of several hormones and other substances that have been tied to certain cancers.

"I believe our findings suggest that protein intake may be very important in regulating cancer risk," lead study author Dr. Luigi Fontana of Washington University in St. Louis said on Wednesday.

ISLAMABAD - Add another food to the list of those that can help fight off cancer. Called autumn olives, the berries have tremendously high levels of lycopene, which is supposed to help prevent cancer, according to an article.

The berries have up to 17 times more lycopene than tomatoes. The berries look and taste a little bit like cranberries. In Asia, they are eaten as a fruit. The bush itself is pretty common and is considered an invasive species in the United States. The bushes generally thrive, even in poor soil, and are often planted along roads and streams for erosion control and as a source of food for wildlife. The bushes often spread when birds eat the berries and scatter the seeds.

A researcher from Toowoomba, in southern Queensland, is hoping his research into vitamin D could reduce the high rate of skin cancers in Queensland.

A vitamin D deficiency can lead to problems like osteoporosis, rickets and has been linked to diabetes and bacterial infections.

The University of Southern Queensland's Dr David Turnbull is trying to prove that people do not need direct sunlight to receive their vitamin intake.

He says exposure to good ultraviolet B rays under the shade could do the trick.

Housework could help reduce the risk of bowel cancer, a report claims.

Just one hour of "vigorous" housework - scrubbing the floor, vacuuming the stairs or polishing furniture - is the equivalent of a session on the treadmill or a brisk walk. That is considered enough activity to help cut down on the chance of colon tumours.

Bowel cancer is the third commonest cancer in men and the second in women.

ISLAMABAD - Green and black tea can slow down the spread of prostate cancer, while a highly touted antioxidant found in red wine, grapes and peanuts does not perform well as a cancer preventive, two new studies have found.

For the tea study, Susanne Henning, an associate researcher at the Center for Human Nutrition at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine, assigned 20 men, all scheduled for prostate removal due to cancer, to drink either black tea, green tea or soda, five

The aim was to see if substances called polyphenols found in tea might slow prostate cancer cell growth. Other researchers have found these polyphenols induce death in cancer cells.