Cancer, Cancer Treatment

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 7 — Digoxin, a drug used for many years to treat irregular heart rhythms and heart failure, may also be a cancer-fighting agent, researchers report.

Cancer cells need to create new blood vessels to survive. But many of these cells are oxygen-deprived and need to switch on genes that produce a protein called hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF-1), which help cells survive in low-oxygen conditions.

Digoxin reduces HIF-1, causing cancer cells to die, the scientists from Johns Hopkins University found.

Read the rest of this entry »

MONDAY, Jan. 5 — Deanna Babcock’s heart stopped beating on July 20, 2007. Just like that.

“I was swimming in a pool at North Carolina State University, doing normal laps,” recalled Babcock, who was 23 years old and in excellent health, or so she thought. “My strokes started getting sloppy, and I coasted to a stop face down.”

Jim Stoltz’s heart stopped on July 20, 2009. “I was sitting at my desk,” said Stoltz, 66, who is an accountant who lives in Flanders, N.J. “I don’t recall much. I simply went under my desk. I woke up five days later in the hospital.”

Read the rest of this entry »

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A long-term analysis of people who took the arthritis drug Vioxx confirms it doubles the risk of strokes and heart attacks, researchers said on Monday, but this risk goes away a year after people stop taking it.

And other drugs in the same class of painkillers known as Cox-2 inhibitors may cause similar harm, they said.

“The good news is the data suggests that the risk doesn’t persist forever. The risk goes back toward normal after a year of follow up,” said Dr. Robert Bresalier of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas, whose study appears in the journal Lancet.

Read the rest of this entry »

WASHINGTON - Women who take hormone replacement therapy to treat menopause symptoms do not have a higher than usual risk of heart attack, especially if they use a cream or skin patch or take cyclic hormone combinations, Danish researchers reported yesterday.

Their study, published in the European Heart Journal, suggests it is not hormone replacement therapy that raises the risk of heart attacks in women, but the way it is taken.

It also shows that the Women’s Health Initiative, which frightened many women away from HRT after it was stopped in 2002, may not be the last word on treatment.

Read the rest of this entry »