Medical News Base

When poet Wally Whitman authored that people “contain multitudes,” he was speaking metaphorically, but he was correct within the literal sense. Every individual carries over 100 trillion individual microbial cells inside the intestine – ten occasions more cells than comprise your body itself.

Now, David Artis, PhD, connect professor of Microbiology, together with postdoctoral fellow David Hill, PhD, in the Perelman Med school in the College of Pennsylvania, and collaborators in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and institutions in Japan and Germany, have discovered these commensal bacteria might play a huge role in impacting on and controlling allergic inflammation. The commensal relationship that evolves between humans and internal bacteria is a by which both humans and bacteria derive benefits.
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Gut Bacteria Control Allergic Diseases 2012 medical allergy news

Some women achieve orgasm throughout exercise, especially individuals which involve the core stomach muscles, investigator Debby Herbenick, and J. Dennis Fortenberry, M.D., both from Indiana College, authored within the journal Sexual and Relationship Therapy. Exercises that appears to be connected with female orgasms are abdominal training exercises, lifting weights, spinning/biking, and climbing rods or ropes, the writer added.

The scientists explain that “coregasm” – reaching a climax from working out the core stomach muscles – continues to be pointed out in media for a while. However, they include that the findings within this latest study are new.
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Some Women Orgasm During Exercise 2012 Fitness sport news

According to a study published on bmj.com, regular cervical screening can considerably increase a women’s chance of surviving cervical cancer. The study, the first to estimate chances of surviving cervical cancer, was conducted by researchers from the Centre for Research and Development in Gävle and the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.

The team examined all 1,230 women diagnosed with cervical cancer in the country between 1999 and 2001.
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Regular Smear Tests Raises Chances Of Cervical Cancer Cure 66% To 92%

A new report from the American Cancer Society (ACS) shows that rates of cancer deaths in the United States continue the downward trend of the last two decades. The new figures show that over the past ten years of available data (up to 2008), cancer deaths have fallen by more than 1% a year in men and women for all but one of the racial/ethnic groups in the US, the exception being American Indians/Alaska Natives, among whom rates have remained stable.

The result is that more than a million cancer deaths have been avoided in the last 20 years, the ACS told the press.

The figures are in the ACS annual report, which was published online in the 4 January issue of the society’s journal CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians.

Each year, the ACS estimates numbers of new cancer cases and deaths anticipated in the US in the current year and brings together the most recent data on cancer incidence, deaths and survival drawn from figures collected by the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries and the National Center for Health Statistics.

This latest report estimates a total of 1,638,910 new cancer cases and 577,190 deaths from cancer are anticipated for 2012 in the US.

From the compilation of the most recent 5 years for which there is data, that is from 2004 to 2008, the report shows that:

Overall cancer incidence went down slightly in men, by 0.6% per year, but remained stable in women.

Rates of cancer deaths, on the other hand, fell both for men and for women (by 1.8% and 1.6% per year respectively).

The fastest fall in annual death rates was among African American and Hispanic men (2.4% and 2.3% respectively).

Death rates continue to fall for all four major cancers: lung, colorectal, breast and prostate.

Falls in death rates for lung cancer account for nearly 40% of the total in men, while breast cancer accounts for 34% of the total decline in cancer deaths in women.

Overall, the fall in cancer deaths since 1990 in men and 1991 in women means a total of 1,024,400 fewer deaths in the last two decades.

The ACS estimates that around a third of cancer deaths in 2012 will be tobacco-related, and another third will be linked to overweight and obesity, insufficient physical activity and poor diet.

The authors note that:

“Further progress can be accelerated by applying existing cancer control knowledge across all segments of the population, with an emphasis on those groups in the lowest socioeconomic bracket.”

However, while the steady decrease in deaths to the four cancers that are responsible for most cancer deaths (lung, colon, breast, and prostate), there has been an increase in the last ten years or so in the number of people who are developing less common cancers such as pancreatic, liver, thyroid, kidney, melanoma of the skin, esophageal adenocarcinoma (cancer of the esophagus or food pipe), and some kinds of throat cancer associated with HPV (human papillomavirus) infection. These feature as a special topic in the cancer facts and figures section that accompanies the report.

Increases in these cancers varied among different groups. For instance rates for thyroid and kidney cancers have gone up in all racial and ethnic groups except for American Indian/Alaska Native men, and rates for HPV-related throat cancer and melanoma increased only among whites.

We don’t know for sure why these rates have gone up, but some, such as increases in cancer of the esophagus, pancreas, liver, and kidney, may be obesity-related. Another reason could be improved earlier detection.

Cancer is tough to kill and has many ways of evading the drugs used by oncologists to try and eliminate it.

Now, researchers at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have uncovered how an advanced form of melanoma gets around an inhibitor, Zelboraf, which targets the mutated BRAF gene.

By examining the part of the melanoma genome that encodes proteins, called the exome, Jonsson Cancer Center scientists discovered that in some patients with BRAF-mutated metastatic melanoma, the mutated BRAF gene driving the cancer becomes amplified as the cancer develops resistance to a BRAF inhibitor. Quite simply, by increasing the copies of the mutated BRAF gene, the melanoma is trying to over produce the drug target protein and outnumber the inhibitor. The findings may lead to alternative ways of preventing or treating resistant melanomas.
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Mechanism Revealed For Melanoma Drug Resistance 2012 health news

In the March 8 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, a team of researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center report on an extremely rare phenomenon known as the abscopal effect, in cancer patients with melanoma, treated with the immunotherapeutic agent ipilimumab (Yervoy™). The study was conducted at Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Ludwig Center for Cancer Immunotherapy.

The abscopal effect occurs when localized radiation therapy delivered to a single tumor in a patient with advanced stage cancer destroys tumors outside of the radiation field. Even though this phenomenon is extremely rare, it has been reported in several cancers, including kidney, melanoma, and lymphoma cancer.
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Abscopal Effect – When Radiation Also Destroys Non Targeted Tumors

Results of a small trial published online on 5 March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where patients with progressive metastatic melanoma were treated with billions of lab-grown clones of the their own anti-tumor cells, are raising hopes that a treatment can be developed to knock back the advanced form of this most dangerous skin cancer.

Melanoma is a type of cancer that develops in the pigment-producing cells of the skin. Metastatic melanoma is melanoma that has spread to other parts of the body, such as the tissue that lies beneath the skin, the lymph nodes, or to organs like the lungs, liver, brain and bones.

The small, early-phase trial involved 11 patients, and was led Dr Cassian Yee of the Clinical Research Divison of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle in the US.

The aim of the trial was to find the most suitable environment in which to infuse 15 to 20 billion tumor-fighting CD8+ T cells so they could last as long as possible in the body to fight cancer cells.

Yee and colleagues extracted CD8+ T cells from 11 patients with progressive metastatic melanoma that was no longer responding to conventional treatment and multiplied them in the lab before re-infusing them back into their bloodstream.

CD8+ T cells are a type of white blood cell in the body’s immune system that attacks a protein associated with the cancer.

Yee, an expert in T cell therapy for patients with cancer, and a researcher in the Hutchinson Center’s immunotherapy program, told the press:

“Our results confirm that if we can develop methods to grow these kinds of cells in the lab, then we can give these high-proliferating, helper-independent T cells to all patients for T-cell therapy.”

“Fortunately, we have been able to achieve this goal and are in the process of treating patients in an ongoing study with these helper-independent T cells,” he added.

The results showed that one of the 11 patients experienced complete remission that has lasted for at least three years.

Four other patients experienced a temporary halt in cancer growth.
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Advanced Melanoma: Using Patients’ Own Anti-Tumor Cells Holds Treatment Promise

Malignant melanoma cases are on the rise in the UK, with about 10,000 individuals diagnosed each year. This specific type of cancer claims 2,300 deaths annually and disproportionately affects young people. In the UK, malignant melanoma is now the second most frequent cancer in those aged 15 to 34 years. Once the cancer is advanced, i.e. once it has spread to other organs, treatment becomes complicated and the life expectancy is short.

The European Commission has licensed a new life-extending drug for adults with advanced inoperable melanoma or whose cancer has spread. Vemurafenib is now available in the UK by Roche under the name of Zelboraf as the first personalized treatment that demonstrated to increase patients’ survival time with a specific BRAF gene mutation.
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Zelboraf Skin Cancer Medication Launches In UK 2012 health news

Malignant Melanoma is known to be highly aggressive, spreading rapidly to other parts of the body if left untreated. It’s extremely rare, however, for it to be able to pass to an unborn fetus. This is what appears to have happened in the case of Briana Cox, who had malignant skin melanoma removed in 2006.

Doctors were sure that the cancer had been stopped in time, and Briana was given the all clear, going on to have a son David, who is now three, and a daughter Addison, in June 2011. Sadly, just two months after the birth, Briana collapsed while jogging, and was found to have advanced cancer in many parts of her body, including her brain.

In September 2011, four dark patches appeared on her baby Addison’s forehead and visits to the doctor led to a diagnosis of stage four melanoma. Her mother, Briana, died in February at the age of 33, from advanced metastasized cancer, but was determined to tell the painful story of how the cancer had spread to her unborn baby.

Doctors have been flummoxed as to how the metastasized cancer was able to pass across the placenta to the developing fetus. Dr. Pooja Hingorani, a pediatric oncologist who is now treating Addison at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, confirmed that the number of documented cases of something like this occurring is miniscule.

James Cox, Briana’s husband and father to Addison, was in the Azores serving in the U.S. Air Force when his wife was diagnosed. He lamented that :

“It was like running into a brick wall … It knocks the wind out of you. It was like being punched in the chest. And when Addison was, it was like being ejected from a car. You wonder, what’s next?”
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Melanoma Passes From Mother To Unborn 2012 health news cancer

Zelboraf (vemurafenib), manufactured by Roche, has been approved by the European Commission, for treating patients with BRAF V600 mutation-positive metastatic melanoma, a deadly, and dangerous type of skin cancer. Zelboraf works by seeking out the mutated parts of the BRAF protein, found in about 50% of all melanoma cases, and blocking its action.

Hal Barron, M.D., head of Global Product Development and Chief Medical Officer at Roche said:

“Today’s approval is important news for people with BRAF mutation-positive metastatic melanoma as Zelborad significantly improves patient survival and exemplifies the benefits that Roche’s personalized approach to medicine can provide for patients, physicians, and society.”

The Roche cobs 4800 BRAF V600 Mutation Test, a diagnostic test co-designed by Roche, to figure out which patients were eligible for treatment, showed that Zelboraf is the only known treatment which benefits the survival rates in some patients with accelerated melanoma who possess the BRAF V600 mutation, and who have been treated before or have not previously been treated.

Zelboraf tests showed many improvements, compared with chemotherapy. The risk of mortality was lowered by 63% in patients who received Zelboraf. It greatly improved life expectancy, compared to normal treatment by an overall survival rate of 13.2 months. Chemotherapy treatment usually gives patients a 9.6 month window of life expectancy after treatment.
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Zelboraf (vemurafenib), For Deadly Skin Cancer, Approved In Europe