Cancer, Cancer Treatment

- Actor Patrick Swayze, who has stage IV pancreatic cancer, has checked himself into a hospital for observation because he has pneumonia.

Executives from A&E, the network behind Swayze’s new TV show, The Beast, announced Swayze’s hospitalization today in Las Vegas at the Television Critics Association.

Swayze, 56, was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer, which had already spread to his liver, in March 2008. Swayze spoke with ABC’s Barbara Walters about his cancer and cancer treatment in a television interview that aired two days ago.

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The detection of cancer-associated proteins, or biomarkers, in blood samples is a potentially powerful tool for early diagnosis of cancer and monitoring of cancer treatment.

A team led by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, has developed a compact prototype detector that uses magnetic nanotechnology to spot cancer-associated proteins in a human blood serum sample, with much higher sensitivity than current detectors.

The National Cancer Institute has announced its decision to suspend a study on the benefits of vitamin E and selenium supplements treatments on prostate cancer prevention. The study, called SELECT (Selenium and vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial), involved more than 35,000 men and was conducted at 400 sites around the United States.

Researchers found a higher risk for aggressive prostate cancer in participants taking only vitamin E and a small increased risk of developing diabetes in subjects taking only selenium. The researchers cautioned that those effects may have been due to chance and they were not statistically significant.

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Warning: “Smoking is injurious to health”
There is a dictum that “everything has its harm and benefits”, but does smoking has any beneficial effect? Yes, it has. Those are too insignificant in comparison to the injury it causes to our body.
Its easy to enumerate them .There are so few of them. They are:
1. Smoking decreases appetite(but no evidence of benefits to overweight ones)
2. Risk of ulcerative colitis is reduced in smokers.
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