The Surgeon

According to Heinz-Josef Lenz, M.D., professor of medicine, Keck School of Medicine, USC and the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, diet may have a major impact on people’s risk of developing cancer. Colorectal cancer is the third most-common cause of cancer-related death in men and women in the nation.

The most important risk factor is red meat, particularly beef, he says. The countries with the highest beef consumption are the ones with the highest colon cancer risk. White meat such as chicken and pork don¹t seem to be associated with colon cancer risk.

Alcohol consumption is another major risk factor, particularly for women, Lenz notes. To reduce risk, people should limit themselves to one glass of wine per day.

Avoiding alcohol and decreasing intake of red meat can decrease your risk of colon cancer significantly, he says.

People should have rich sources of calcium intake, such as dairy products, daily. It is also important to include fiber-rich foods such as fruits and vegetables and reduce intake of fatty foods. One of the most powerful ways to reduce colon cancer development is vitamin D and calcium.

With easy adjustments in your diet, supplements such as calcium and modest exercise you can reduce your risk of colon cancer by more than 50 percent,² says Lenz.

News source

Related posts

• No related posts.

One day the doctors may be able to detect early stages of colon cancer without a biopsy. They will can use the new technique developed by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
This imaging technology is one of many new ways of detecting cancers in the body in real time.
The first research is to detect the colon cancer.

(more…)

Related posts

• Drug Combination Reduces Colon Cancer Risk With Reduced Toxic Side Effects (0)
• Virtual Colonscopy with Protruding Polyp (0)
• Racial Differences In Response To Bowel Cancer Genetic Risk Factor (0)
• Anti-Cancer Activity Of Tea In Gastrointestinal Cells Affected By Digestive Process (0)

Women with breast cancer have more aggressive disease and lower survival rates if they are overweight or obese, according to findings published in the March 15 issue of Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

“The more obese a patient is, the more aggressive the disease,” said Massimo Cristofanilli, MD, associate professor of medicine in the Department of Breast Medical Oncology at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. “We are learning that the fat tissue may increase inflammation that leads to more aggressive disease.”

Cristofanilli and colleagues observed 606 women with locally advanced breast cancer. These women were classified by body mass index into the following three groups: normal/underweight (24.9 or below), overweight (at least 25 but less than 30) or obese (more than 30). Body mass index is calculated by dividing a person’s weight by their height.

At five years, overall survival was 56.8 percent among obese women, 56.3 percent among overweight women and 67.4 percent among normal weight women. The 10-year survival rate was 42.7 percent among obese women, 41.8 percent among overweight women and 56.5 percent among normal weight women.

The rate of inflammatory breast cancer, previously shown to have worse outcomes than non-inflammatory breast cancer, among obese women was 45 percent compared with 30 percent in overweight women and only 15 percent in women considered normal weight, researchers found.

Risk of breast cancer recurrence was also higher in obese or overweight women. By five years, 50.8 percent of obese women reported a recurrence compared with 38.5 percent of normal weight women. By 10 years, the rate of recurrence was 58 percent among obese women and 45.4 percent among normal weight women.

“Obesity goes far beyond just how a person looks or any physical strain from carrying around extra weight. Particular attention should be paid to our overweight patients,” Cristofanilli said.

Cristofanilli said physicians need to pay close attention to breast cancer patients because commonly used drugs, such as tamoxifen, tend to increase weight gain during treatment.

“We have actually become quite good at managing acute side effects such as nausea in our chemotherapy patients and it goes away within a couple of days,” Cristofanilli said.

“Following the nausea, our patients tend to overeat, which further increases their risk of weight gain. We need to implement lifestyle modifications interventions and develop better methods to follow these patients closely.”

News sourse

Related posts

• Vigorous exercise protects against breast cancer (0)
• Surgery And Drugs Alone Are Not Enough To Combat Obesity (0)
• Novel Peptide Vaccine Reduces Mortality in Women With HER2-Overexpression Breast Cancer (0)
• MRI for Breast Cancer (0)
• Molecular Breast Imaging (0)

The hottest area of minimally invasive surgery is now that of NOTES (natural orifice transluminal endoscopic surgery) and SPA (single port access). However, most of the work has been in the laboratory and very little has seen the light of clinical experience. Herein, using a novel Uni-X Single Port Access Laparoscopic System (Pnavel Systems, Morganville, NJ), the authors report successfully performing renal cryotherapy (4), wedge biopsy of a kidney (1), abdominal sacrocolpopexy (4), and even radical nephrectomy (1). The single access port is placed via a 1.5 cm incision; the port has 3 portals for passage of a 5 mm flexible steerable laparoscopic endoscope and 2, 5 mm articulating instruments. Hence, the endoscope and instruments can be triangulated at broader angles than would be possible with straight instruments or a rigid endoscope passed through the same port.

The single SPA nephrectomy did require an extra 10 mm port which was placed where a 4 cm incision was planned in order to remove the kidney intact. All procedures were successfully accomplished; the average hospital stay was 2.8 days. Unfortunately, no data are provided with regard to use of analgesics, in hospital analog pain scores, or short term convalescence. Likewise, at this point there are no financial data provided with regard to cost of the SPA port or the specialized, apparently disposable, articulating/rotating instrumentation. The next challenge is to answer the aphorism: “All things good were once new, but all things new are not necessarily good.”. At this point in time, this new approach could easily be subjected to a prospective randomized study be it for sacrocolpopexy or renal cryotherapy. At the very least, it will need a retrospective controlled analysis in the process of determining its proper place in the less invasive armamentarium.

News source

Related posts

• No related posts.

The use of combination chemotherapy following surgery did not improve survival in patients with gastric cancer, according to a randomized clinical trial published online March 11 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The only potentially curative therapy currently available for non-metastatic gastric cancer is surgery. Recent studies have suggested that a combination of cisplatin, epirubicin, 5-fluorouracil and leucovorin (PELF) improves outcome in patients with metastatic gastric cancer.
(more…)

Related posts

• PET Scanning Achieves Earlier Detection Of Colorectal Cancer Recurrence (2)
• Perioperative Chemotherapy’s Role In Management Of Patients With Resectable Liver Metastases From Colorectal Cancer (0)
• Chemotherapy-Induced Anemia Increases Risk Of Local Breast Cancer Recurrence (0)
• Can starving yourself help combat cancer? (0)
• Anti-Cancer Activity Of Tea In Gastrointestinal Cells Affected By Digestive Process (0)

Allison Gandey

March 10, 2008 (Hollywood, Florida) — National guidelines continue to err on the side of caution when it comes to screening cancer patients. For example, routine computed tomography (CT) scans for lung cancer patients are discouraged, and the evidence does not support the use of posttreatment positron emission tomography (PET) in breast cancer. Experts presenting here at the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) 13th Annual Conference debated the pros and cons of imaging in cancer patients.

“There are no absolutes in imaging,” presenter Harmeet Kaur, MD, a radiologist from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, told Medscape Oncology. “In many cases, the CT and PET findings will contradict one another. The only way to deal with these complexities is to take the clinical context into account.”

(more…)

Related posts

• Vitamin D Inhibits Post-Menopausal Breast Cancer – Clinical Results (0)
• Tiny magnets offer breakthrough in gene therapy for cancer (0)
• Technology To Detect Liver Disease Via Blood Test To Be Developed (0)
• Scientists pioneer new treatment for prostate cancer (0)
• Risk Of Breast Cancer Reduced By Essential Nutrient Found In Eggs (0)

In December 2007, a jury awarded a plaintiff $10 million as a result of a doctor accidentally leaving a surgical sponge inside the plaintiff after his procedure. The increasing frequency of such verdicts, in combination with new government mandates regarding patient safety, are leading health-care providers to take a long-overdue look at new technologies designed to reduce so-called “never-events.” This is being accelerated by Medicare and private insurers’ newly announced refusal to reimburse the costs associated with preventable medical errors. Currently, hospitals attempt to prevent retained sponges by requiring nurses to individually hand count all the sponges that will be used in a procedure – tracking the sponge counts on a white board. At the end of the procedure, all sponges – both dirty and clean – are counted again by hand and reconciled with the original count. Leading patient safety researchers estimate that of the average 4,000 sponges a year accidentally left behind in patients, at least 88% percent of cases falsely recorded a correct sponge count. This manual method of counting sponges, which is prone to human error, was first established in the 1940’s with little change in the intervening sixty years.
(more…)

Related posts

• No related posts.