By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Beta carotene, vitamin C and vitamin E supplements taken for years failed to lower overall cancer risk in the latest study to cast doubt on the possibility that such dietary supplements can prevent cancer.
The findings, published on Tuesday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, followed two other important studies that also did not show that various antioxidant supplements could prevent cancer.
Drinking just three cups of coffee a day may make women’s breasts shrink, a study finds.
Nearly 300 women were surveyed by researchers from Sweden’s Lund University about their bust measurements and how many cups of coffee they drank in an average day.
They found that three cups a day was enough to start making breasts shrink, with the effects increasing for every additional cup of coffee consumed.
They said there was a clear link between drinking coffee and smaller breasts, as about half of women possessed a gene shown to link breast size to coffee intake. The news wasn’t all bad, however. Researchers also found that regular caffeine intake may reduce the risk of breast cancer.
(Ivanhoe Newswire) — The findings of a multi-institution team of researchers give key insight into genetic changes that take place in the most common form of lung cancer, lung adenocarcinoma.
Members of the Tumor Sequencing Project (TSP) consortium have successfully identified 26 genes that are frequently mutated in patients with lung adenocarcinoma. These findings more than double the number of genes previously known to be associated with the deadly disease. Beyond identification, the TSP team also detailed key pathways involved in the disease and found patterns of mutation common among different subgroups of lung cancer patients.
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.
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.
The trial of Procter & Gamble’s Intrinsa testosterone patches for women was sponsored by Procter & Gamble and the treatment was indicated for hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD).
“HSDD is characterized as a lack or absence of sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity for some period of time”, Wikipedia states. An estimated 26.7% among premenopausal women and 52.4% among naturally menopausal women had the condition, according to another study published in the July 2008 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.
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.
Thursday October 16, 2008 (foodconsumer.org) — In the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, you may do something to help yourselves reduce the risk of breast cancer. But first, equip yourselves with current knowledge about how to prevent the disease.
We have published quite a few articles on breast cancer prevention because it is better for women to prevent the disease from developing in the first place than to get treated after contracting the disease.