| Prostate Cancer Radiotherapy Won't Affect Sexual Function
MONDAY, Oct. 29 (HealthDay News) High-dose precision radiation therapy doesn't harm the sexual function of prostate cancer patients, U.S. researchers say. A team at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia tracked 155 men with intermediate- to high-risk prostate cancer who underwent intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), a technique that more precisely targets the tumor. "IMRT is revolutionizing how we treat men with prostate cancer, because it improves our ability to avoid normal tissue. As a result, more radiation dose can be delivered to the prostate by increasing the amount of radiation each day. Increasing the radiation used each day is particularly attractive, because it also shortens the treatment time by several days," study lead author Dr. Mark Buyyounouski, attending physician in the radiology department at Fox Chase, said in a prepared statement.
New Computational Technique Can Predict Drug Side Effects
Early identification of adverse effects of drugs before they are tested in humans is crucial in developing new therapeutics, as unexpected effects account for a third of all drug failures during the development process. Now researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have developed a novel technique using computer modeling to identify potential side effects of pharmaceuticals, and have used the technique to study a class of drugs that includes tamoxifen, the most prescribed drug in the treatment of breast cancer. Their study is currently available on line at PLoS Computational Biology.
Conventional test methods screen compounds in animal studies in advance of human trials in the hope of identifying the side effects of promising therapeutics. The UCSD team - led by Philip Bourne, Ph.D., professor of pharmacology at UCSD's Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Lei Xie, Ph.D., of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD - instead uses the power of computational modeling to screen specific drug molecules using a worldwide repository, the Protein Data Bank (PDB), containing tens of thousands of three-dimensional protein structures.
Obesity May Worsen Ovarian Cancer
The doctors included James Pavelka, MD, and Andrew Li, MD, of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. If their finding is correct, it could lengthen the list of possible links between obesity and cancer. Obesity has already been tied to cancers of the breast, colon, esophagus, kidney, and endometrium (inner uterus lining). Links to ovarian cancer haven't been certain, the researchers note. They studied the records of 216 women undergoing surgery and treatment for ovarian cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The patients were in their late-50s to mid-60s, on average. They included 146 women with advanced ovarian cancer (stage III or IV ovarian cancer). Ovarian cancer is hard to spot in its earliest, most treatable stages.
New Marker To Identify Cancer Stem Cells Discovered
ScienceDaily (Dec. 12, 2007) Researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center have found a marker that can be used to identify stem cells in breast tumors, suggesting a potential simple test that could help determine the best treatment for breast cancer. .
Drinking And Smoking Don't Boost HPV-Related Cancer Risk
Heavy smoking and drinking are known to cause head and neck cancer. Infection with human papillomavirus type 16 (HPV16), a common strain of the sexually-transmitted HPV virus, is another known risk factor for head and neck cancer, which affects about 500,000 people each year worldwide.New Brown University research, however, shows that alcohol and tobacco use doesn't further increase the risk of contracting head and neck cancers for people infected with HPV16. This finding, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is the strongest evidence to date that these major cancers have two distinct causes -- and may represent two distinct classes of cancer -- and would require different prevention and treatment strategies.Karl Kelsey, M.D., a Brown professor of community health and pathology and laboratory medicine and the director of the Center for Environmental Health and Technology, said the research has public health policy implications.While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that girls and young women receive the HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer -- HPV16 causes about half of all cervical cancer cases -- boys and men cannot get the vaccine.
Mismatched' Prostate Cancer Treatment Prevalent
More than a third of men with early prostate cancer who participated in a study analyzing treatment choice received therapies that might not be appropriate, based on pre-existing problems with urinary, bowel or sexual function. The prevalence of these treatment "mismatches" could reflect patient' unwillingness to discuss such problems with their physicians. The study will appear in the January 1, 2008 issue of the journal Cancer and is being released online."Prostate cancer patients experience the same fears and hard decisions as all cancer patients do, but prostate cancer treatment directly affects very personal things that most people aren't comfortable talking about - urinary, bowel and sexual function," says James Talcott, MD, SM, of the Center for Outcomes Research at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cancer Center, who led the study.
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