Cancer, Cancer Treatment

A new online tool for calculating colorectal cancer risk in men and women age 50 or older was launched today, based on a new risk-assessment model developed by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health.

This new tool may assist health care providers and their patients in making informed choices about when and how to screen for colorectal cancer and can be used in designing colorectal cancer screening and prevention trials. An article describing the new risk-assessment model and a second article describing its validation appear online December 29, 2008, in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The risk assessment tool is available on the NCI Web site at www.cancer.gov/colorectalcancerrisk, and people using this tool should work with their health care providers to interpret the results.

A new epidemiological study has found that among women who have never used menopausal hormone therapy, obese women are at an increased risk of developing ovarian cancer compared with women of normal weight.

Published in the February 15, 2009 issue of CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the research indicates that obesity may contribute to the development of ovarian cancer through a hormonal mechanism.

Ovarian cancer is the most fatal of gynecologic malignancies, and has a 5-year survival rate of only 37 percent. While studies have linked excess body weight to higher risks of certain cancers, little is known about the relationship between body mass index and ovarian cancer risk.

Coffee isn?t harmful to your health, a new study confirms that theory. Is it true that long term, regular coffee consumption may speed the progression of aggressive forms of breast cancer? The findings of a new study published in the Oct. Issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine suggest caffeine ?does not appear to be associated with overall risk of breast cancer.?

For the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, study co-author Dr. Shumin M. Zhang, from the division of preventive medicine, in the department of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues from Tokyo Women?s Medical University in Japan examined the diets of a pool of almost 39,000 women over the age of 45 over a period of ten years. The participants were asked to provide details of their diet, including their coffee habits. 1,188 of the 38,432 study participants developed invasive breast cancer over 10 years of follow-up.

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Drugs used to control diabetes may lower the risk of prostate cancer, investigators at the University of Tampere in Finland report.

“Recent studies have reported a decreased prostate cancer risk for diabetic men, although the evidence is controversial,” Dr. Teemu J. Murtola and colleagues note in the American Journal of Epidemiology. “It is currently unclear whether use of antidiabetic medication affects the association between diabetes and prostate cancer.”

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Breast cancer patients are risking their lives by failing to take the tamoxifen they are prescribed, according to a new study published in the British Journal of Cancer.

Half of the women failed to finish a five year course of the drug and one in five regularly forget to take a tablet.

Experts already know that taking tamoxifen for five years increases survival chances and the new research reveals that women who miss at least one tablet every five days have a 10 per cent greater risk of dying.

SUNDAY, Nov. 2 — Obesity can wreck a person’s health for many reasons. But for women, too much weight tacks on an additional danger: Studies have linked obesity and breast cancer in a variety of ways.

Doctors aren’t sure why this link exists and are trying to figure out what ties weight gain to breast cancer. But they are more and more convinced the link is there, and they are urging women to watch their weight and increase their exercise to help stave off what is the most common cancer among females, nonmelanoma skin cancer aside.

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- Physical activity may cut cancer risk, and sleeping at least seven hours per night may maximize that benefit.

That’s according to new research presented today in Washington, D.C. at an international meeting on cancer prevention hosted by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR).

The researchers, who included James McClain, PhD, MPH, a cancer prevention fellow at the National Cancer Institute, reviewed data on nearly 6,000 Maryland women.

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In the run up to the New Year’s Eve festivities a scientist in Britain has chosen an opportune moment to warn revellers that drinking alcohol, even in relatively small amounts, can increase a tipplers risk of developing cancer.

Dr. Rachel Thompson, from the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) says that a large glass of wine, a pint of beer or two measures of gin or vodka on a daily basis can increase a person’s bowel and liver cancer risk by as much as 20%.

A large government study of whether Vitamin E and selenium protect men against prostate cancer has been suspended, federal health officials announced yesterday, after an independent analysis determined that the nutrients did not reduce the risk for the common malignancy.

The $119 million study, involving more than 35,000 men, also found hints that the nutrients might increase the risk for prostate cancer and diabetes, although officials stressed that those findings may be a coincidence.

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A study that was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that vitamin B supplements did not protect people taking them from developing cancer, although past research has suggested it did have the aforementioned effect.

Lead author of the study Dr. Shumin Zhang of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, along with his team, looked at 5,442 female health-care professionals throughout the United States, all of whom had been taking a supplement including vitamins B6, B12 and B9 (also known as folic acid) daily over a period of about seven and a half years.

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