The Surgeon

Healthy choices and active screening for breast cancer are your best defenses in beating the disease. Also learn about today’s breast cancer treatments so you can discuss them with your doctor.

A new and experimental treatment for breast cancer means that patients and doctors must choose treatments based on incomplete research.

Every year, thousands of babies are born with spina bifida. It’s a birth defect where the spinal column does not close properly, exposing nerves to the environment. Most babies born with spina bifida in the United States have surgery soon after birth. But some children in other countries aren’t so lucky. A little boy from Algeria suffered terribly for more than two years until his community helped raise money to send him to Mayo Clinic.

Using a combination of a targeted cancer-fighting agent called DFMO and a low dose of an anti-inflammatory drug, UC Irvine researchers have reduced the risk of reoccurring colorectal polyps, an early sign of colon cancer, by as much as 95 percent with fewer toxic side effects.

The study marks a breakthrough in the effort to combat colon cancer, the third leading cause of cancer in men and fourth in women, according to Dr. Frank L. Meyskens Jr., the Daniel G. Aldrich Chair at UC Irvine and director of its Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.
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The lesson learned in eradicating dandelions from your yard could apply in treating breast cancer as well, said researchers from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in a report that appears online in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

“It’s not enough to kill the dandelion blossom and stalk that appear above ground,” said Dr. Michael Lewis, assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology and a faculty member in the Lester and Sue Smith Breast Cancer Center at BCM. “You have to kill the root beneath the soil as well.”
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