Vit D linked to cancer, autoimmune disease genes
(Reuters) – Scientists have found that vitamin D influences more than 200 genes, including ones related to cancer and autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis — a discovery that shows how serious vitamin D deficiency can be.
Worldwide, an estimated one billion people are deficient in vitamin D, and a team of scientists from Britain and Canada said health authorities should consider recommending supplements for those at most risk.
“Our study shows quite dramatically the wide-ranging influence that vitamin D exerts over our health,” said Andreas Heger of the Functional Genomics Unit at Britain’s Oxford University, who led the study.
Vitamin D effects our DNA through something called the vitamin D receptor (VDR), which binds to specific locations of the human genome. Heger’s team mapped out these points and identified more than 200 genes that it directly influences.
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How Salmonella Helps Kill Cancer Cells
By Gwyneth Dickey, Science News
When a bad bacterium infects tumor cells, it can signal the body to fight the deadliest form of skin cancer.
Scientists already knew that diarrhea-causing Salmonella typhimurium helps the immune system recognize melanoma, but a paper in the Aug. 11 Science Translational Medicine shows how. The finding may point to a new human vaccine for melanoma and possibly other kinds of cancer.
“In combination with other therapies, it could improve survival,” says tumor biologist Meenhard Herlyn of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. But melanoma is such a complex cancer that a vaccine probably couldn’t cure the disease permanently, adds Herlyn, who was not involved with the study.
When Salmonella was injected into mouse melanoma tumors, those tumors shrank, as did untreated tumors in other parts of the body. Experiments showed that the process relied on the presence of a protein channel called connexin 43 on the surface of melanoma cells.. That protein channel allows the cells to connect to similar channels in immune cells, forming ‘gap junctions’ that allow the two cells to share their contents.
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5 of nature’s best cancer-preventing foods
As a veteran faculty member at the Stanford University Medical School, Dr. John Farquhar has seen thousands of patients try to beat cancer with aggressive chemotherapy treatments that “blast them with terrible side effects.” But, as the founder of Stanford’s Prevention Research Center, he believes he has helped other patients beat cancer before it starts using nature’s medicine: vegetables and fruits.
Farquhar has worked at the university for 30 years as a professor, a cardiologist and the co-founder of the Stanford Prevention Research Center. He co-teaches a popular course called “The Best Diet Ever,” (see box) in which he preaches the merits of five foods with strong anti-cancer agents: soy, onions, broccoli, tomatoes and blueberries.
“There’s still uncertainty about how important nutrition is in cancer prevention,” Farquhar said, “but I’ve found that if you deal with these specific foods, there’s evidence that they all have cancer-fighting nutrients. As opposed to genetics, nutrition is something that people can control.”
Joyce Hanna is the associate director of Stanford Prevention Research Center. A 19-year Stanford faculty member and former marathon runner, she teaches “The Best Diet Ever” class with Farquhar. Hanna also counsels clients who want to engage in healthier lifestyles and oversees a program that helps cancer patients exercise and eat well during and after treatments.
Beating disease back
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Cancer cells slurp up fructose, U.S. study finds
(Reuters) – Pancreatic tumor cells use fructose to divide and proliferate, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a study that challenges the common wisdom that all sugars are the same.
Tumor cells fed both glucose and fructose used the two sugars in two different ways, the team at the University of California Los Angeles found.
They said their finding, published in the journal Cancer Research, may help explain other studies that have linked fructose intake with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest cancer types.
“These findings show that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation,” Dr. Anthony Heaney of UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center and colleagues wrote.
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Raising cancer awareness, one pedal at a time
Washington (CNN) — When Anne Feeley was diagnosed in April 2006 with an aggressive form of brain cancer, doctors told her to prepare for the worst.
But Feeley was determined not to take the diagnosis lying down.
Her psychiatrist told her that most children who suffer from cancer do best when they can “forget” they have the disease.
So instead of retreating to her bed, Feeley began working with a personal trainer the week she was released from the hospital, running and doing yoga to build her strength and endurance — even while sporting staples in her head from the surgery to remove her tumor. Within a year, she completed a half-marathon.
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Cancer always a worry for survivors
(CNN) — Jasan Zimmerman remembers running into his room, burying his head under a pillow and saying he didn’t want to die. His mother chased after him and told him, “I’m not going to let you die.”
He was 15, and his parents had just told him that he had his second case of cancer, which was most likely caused by radiation from treating the first.
Zimmerman, now a 34-year-old molecular biologist in Palo Alto, California, has had three instances of cancer: a neuroblastoma on the neck at 6 months old, thyroid cancer at 15 and a recurrence of thyroid cancer at 21. He has been healthy since then, but he hasn’t stopped worrying about getting sick again.
“It’s always in the back of my mind; it kind of depends what brings it to the forefront,” he said. “I had a bruise on my leg, and I didn’t know where it came from, and I was worried that it was some kind of blood cancer. Little things like that kind of hit me.”
A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that survivors of childhood cancer are at increased risk of dying of second cancers and circulatory diseases 25 years or more after their diagnosis.
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10,000-plus in U.S. die for lack of cancer screens: CDC
(Reuters) – At least 10,000 people and possibly far more die in the United States each year because they have not been screened for colon or breast cancer, according to a government report released on Tuesday.
But more people are being screened than ever before, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in the first of a series of new reports on health statistics.
“We are encouraged by a significant increase in colon cancer screening rates over recent years,” CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden told reporters in a telephone briefing.
But, he added, “more than a third of Americans who need to be screened haven’t been screened.”
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Cancer survivors are often parents of young children
(Reuters Health) – More than 1.5 million cancer survivors in the United States are parents living with children younger than age 18, according to a study published online today in the journal Cancer.
The researchers hope this figure — calculated for the first time — will help make health care providers more aware of these families and provide them with additional support.
“I think people have vastly underestimated the number of children who are affected by a parent’s cancer,” Dr. Paula Rauch, who was not involved in the study, told Reuters Health.
“It has been easier to measure the number of people who die from cancer, and often people still imagine that most cancer deaths and cancer survivors are elderly and don’t have dependent children,” added Rauch, who is founder and director of the Parenting At a Challenging Time, or PACT, program at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston.
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Coffee may cut risk of head and neck cancers
(Reuters Health) – Coffee might stave off more than just sleep, according to research showing that those who chug a lot of java have a lower rate of head and neck cancers.
Prior research on the link between coffee and cancer has yielded mixed results. Some studies, for example, have found lower rates of kidney and ovarian cancer among coffee drinkers, while there appears to be no effect for colon cancer.
For the new report, scientists pooled results from nine earlier studies on head and neck cancers, which also included information on coffee or tea drinking. In each study, cancer patients had been compared to either the general population or to hospital patients who didn’t have cancer.
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Novartis cancer drug wins wider U.S. approval
(Reuters) – Swiss drugmaker Novartis AG won wider U.S. approval for its leukemia drug Tasigna to treat a rare form of the blood cancer at an earlier stage of the disease, the Food and Drug Administration said on Thursday.
Tasigna had previously been approved to treat adults with chronic myeloid leukemia, or CML, in patients who could not tolerate or were no longer responding to treatment with Gleevec, an older but highly effective Novartis drug.
The new approval could lead to significantly higher sales of Tasigna, known chemically as nilotinib.
In a clinical study presented at a major cancer meeting earlier this month, Tasigna fared better than Gleevec in a head-to-head trial, paving the way for the expanded approval.
About 44 percent of patients taking the newer Novartis pill had a major molecular response compared with 22 percent for Gleevec after 12 months.
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