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A decline in smoking, one of the top risk factors for the disease, may be behind the drop in cases. Jobs lived more than seven years after being diagnosed with a neuroendocrine tumor - a less common, slower-growing and more treatable type of pancreatic cancer than the kind that killed Steinman a week ago and actor Patrick Swayze two years ago. The Apple chief kept details of his illness behind a firewall and declared he was cured after cancer surgery in 2004. However, five years later, gaunt and having lost a lot of weight, Jobs had a liver transplant. Experts said it was likely because his cancer had returned or spread.
A liver transplant sometimes can cure the type of cancer that Jobs had. But if it comes back, "it's usually in one to two years," said Dr. Michael Pishvaian of Georgetown University's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. In January, Jobs announced his third and final leave of absence. He resigned in August and died on Wednesday. Part of what makes pancreatic cancer so deadly is that the pancreas is as vital as the heart. You can live with just part of a liver or a colon, or only one kidney or lung. But the pancreas is a fish-shaped organ that makes digestive enzymes and insulin and other hormones that enable the body to make energy from food.
In the United States, pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer deaths. About 44,030 people will be diagnosed with it and about 37,660 people will die of it this year in the U.S., the American Cancer Society estimates. Possible symptoms are fatigue, back pain, abdominal pain, unexplained weight loss, loss of appetite, jaundice and nausea, according to the Lustgarten Foundation, a private group that finances research on the disease. This cancer often is not found until it is advanced or has spread, and overall survival is dismal: 20 percent after one year and only 4 percent after five years. However, with a neuroendocrine tumor like the one Jobs had, "people can live a longer time; median survival is five to eight years," said Dr. Alan Venook, a pancreatic cancer specialist at the University of California, San Francisco.
The lifetime risk of developing pancreatic cancer is about 1 in 71, according to the cancer society. Men and blacks account for more cases than women and whites, possibly because of differences in smoking rates. Smokers have two to three times more risk of developing the disease. Use of smokeless tobacco also raises the risk. Obese people, those who don't exercise much and diabetics also have more risk for pancreatic cancer. Alcohol use might play a role: Most studies haven't tied it to pancreatic cancer, but heavy drinking can lead to diabetes and liver and pancreas problems that pose a cancer risk, the cancer society says.
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A new trend in pharmaceutical sales has raised concerns over ethics and patient safety, as companies buy up critical cancer drugs in short supply and attempt to resell them at huge markups. Rather than operate by the dark of night on street corners, these drug dealers work in broad daylight using fax, telephone and e-mail to deluge hospitals with offers.
Experts say the so-called gray market is not illegal and could even be poised to surge further after US President Barack Obama issued an executive order that tried to fix the problem, but may have just opened a larger loophole. These are a number of very small firms that have popped up out of nowhere. Most of them are relatively new, said Thomas Smith, director of palliative medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. It happens in every other market, we just dont expect it to happen in pharmaceuticals for cancer treatment.
Fifty-six percent of the 549 hospitals surveyed by the non-profit Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) earlier this year said they received daily solicitations from gray market vendors to purchase medications no longer available through the manufacturer or usual wholesaler. Fifty-two percent admitted to buying one or more drugs from gray market vendors in the past two years, as manufacturers halted production of some generic drugs because they were no longer profitable. I would like to know why hospitals cant get these products, but the scalpers can. It is unreal to have to deal with scalpers in healthcare, said one survey respondent whose name was withheld by ISMP.
Drug prices ranged from 650 percent to 4,000 percent over the usual cost, said the survey, which referred to all kinds of pharmaceuticals, not just cancer drugs. Prescription drug shortages in the US nearly tripled from 2005 to last year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Just why drugs are falling out of production, particularly in cancer care, has to do with the extremely low price of generic medicines and the profit incentive that drives cancer doctors to prescribe costlier medications. Oncologists get a portion of their pay by buying drugs wholesale and billing the governments Medicare behemoth for reimbursement, a practice that ended up paying US doctors more than they spent on the drugs by US$1.6 billion a year.
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How close has cancer hit you or someone you love?
They say 1 out of 3 women will develop some form of cancer, and even tho it's not the number one killer of women (heart disease is), it ranks very high as the killer of men and women.
It kills more people than obesity. It kills more people than heart attacks/strokes.
I loathe fucking cancer, it's my only enemy in life........I am surrounded by it on both sides of my family and I have had to deal with it personally, in my own body~
I wish they would find something to help with this dreaded jackass disease. More and more children are being stricken with some form of cancer.
Instead of them getting closer to finding a cure, I hear about more and more cases~
How close has cancer hit you or someone you love?
They say 1 out of 3 women will develop some form of cancer, and even tho it's not the number one killer of women (heart disease is), it ranks very high as the killer of men and women.
It kills more people than obesity. It kills more people than heart attacks/strokes.
I loathe fucking cancer, it's my only enemy in life........I am surrounded by it on both sides of my family and I have had to deal with it personally, in my own body~
I wish they would find something to help with this dreaded jackass disease. More and more children are being stricken with some form of cancer.
Instead of them getting closer to finding a cure, I hear about more and more cases~
Pretty freaking close. My dad died from it last summer. Frankly, is it worse to die from cancer than from other causes? I doubt it.
Obesity kills many people- not the obesity itself, but the result of obesity on the cardiovascular and respiratory systems. Diabetes is another one, and it seems to be associated with obesity and heart disease as well.
Cancer isn't an enemy- it's a failure of the immune system in most cases. All of us produce cancer cells all the time, but our bodies usually detect it as an abnormality and kill them off. For various reasons, some peoples' immune system fails to recognize the cancer cells as foreign, then they are able to take residence and grow.
Frankly, we are all going to die, and I'd rather die from some of the cancers I've observed the effects of, than of some other causes of death.
How close has cancer hit you or someone you love?
They say 1 out of 3 women will develop some form of cancer, and even tho it's not the number one killer of women (heart disease is), it ranks very high as the killer of men and women.
It kills more people than obesity. It kills more people than heart attacks/strokes.
I loathe fucking cancer, it's my only enemy in life........I am surrounded by it on both sides of my family and I have had to deal with it personally, in my own body~
I wish they would find something to help with this dreaded jackass disease. More and more children are being stricken with some form of cancer.
Instead of them getting closer to finding a cure, I hear about more and more cases~
Pretty freaking close. My dad died from it last summer. Frankly, is it worse to die from cancer than from other causes? I doubt it.
Obesity kills many people- not the obesity itself, but the result of obesity on the cardiovascular and respiratory systems. Diabetes is another one, and it seems to be associated with obesity and heart disease as well.
Cancer isn't an enemy- it's a failure of the immune system in most cases. All of us produce cancer cells all the time, but our bodies usually detect it as an abnormality and kill them off. For various reasons, some peoples' immune system fails to recognize the cancer cells as foreign, then they are able to take residence and grow.
Frankly, we are all going to die, and I'd rather die from some of the cancers I've observed the effects of, than of some other causes of death.
Well many diseases contribute to a heart attack...and from all I gather, a heart attack can happen suddenly..without warning and without much pain.
One can be walking or sitting and feel the discomfort and the next thing everyone sees, is a person slumped to the ground...dead.
Heart attacks happen so sudden, I highly doubt the person who had it, felt much....let's hope not.
Some cancer patients suffer tho.....and it's a terrible sight.
I don't wanna suffer, period...from anything when it's my time to die. Just let my ass go to sleep...or crash very fast and hard into something that kills me instantly..that sort of thing, so I don't have to be in agony~
Pretty freaking close. My dad died from it last summer. Frankly, is it worse to die from cancer than from other causes? I doubt it.
Obesity kills many people- not the obesity itself, but the result of obesity on the cardiovascular and respiratory systems. Diabetes is another one, and it seems to be associated with obesity and heart disease as well.
Cancer isn't an enemy- it's a failure of the immune system in most cases. All of us produce cancer cells all the time, but our bodies usually detect it as an abnormality and kill them off. For various reasons, some peoples' immune system fails to recognize the cancer cells as foreign, then they are able to take residence and grow.
Frankly, we are all going to die, and I'd rather die from some of the cancers I've observed the effects of, than of some other causes of death.
Well many diseases contribute to a heart attack...and from all I gather, a heart attack can happen suddenly..without warning and without much pain.
One can be walking or sitting and feel the discomfort and the next thing everyone sees, is a person slumped to the ground...dead.
Heart attacks happen so sudden, I highly doubt the person who had it, felt much....let's hope not.
Some cancer patients suffer tho.....and it's a terrible sight.
I don't wanna suffer, period...from anything when it's my time to die. Just let my ass go to sleep...or crash very fast and hard into something that kills me instantly..that sort of thing, so I don't have to be in agony~
I have a picture of a beautiful wolf caught in a trap. The wolf is snarling, obviously at someone off camera who is approaching him to finish him off.
The caption on the picture says:
"It takes more courage to suffer than to die."
I cannot look at that picture without crying.
Nearly half of cancers diagnosed in the UK each year - over 130,000 in total - are caused by avoidable life choices including smoking, drinking and eating the wrong things, a review reveals. Tobacco is the biggest culprit, causing 23% of cases in men and 15.6% in women, says the Cancer Research UK report. Next comes a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in men's diets, while for women it is being overweight.
The report is published in the British Journal of Cancer. Its authors claim it is the most comprehensive analysis to date on the subject. Lead author Prof Max Parkin said: "Many people believe cancer is down to fate or 'in the genes' and that it is the luck of the draw whether they get it. "Looking at all the evidence, it's clear that around 40% of all cancers are caused by things we mostly have the power to change."
Weighty matters
For men, the best advice appears to be: stop smoking, eat more fruit and veg and cut down on how much alcohol you drink. For women, again, the reviews says the best advice is to stop smoking, but also watch your weight. Prof Parkin said: "We didn't expect to find that eating fruit and vegetables would prove to be so important in protecting men against cancer. And among women we didn't expect being overweight to be more of a risk factor than alcohol." In total, 14 lifestyle and environmental factors, such as where you live and the job you do, combine to cause 134,000 cancers in the UK each year. About 100,000 (34%) of the cancers are linked to smoking, diet, alcohol and excess weight. One in 25 of cancers is linked to a person's job, such as being exposed to chemicals or asbestos.
Some risk factors are well established, such as smoking's link with lung cancer. But others are less recognised. For example, for breast cancer, nearly a 10th of the risk comes from being overweight or obese, far outweighing the impact of whether or not the woman breastfeeds or drinks alcohol. And for oesophageal or gullet cancer, half of the risk comes from eating too little fruit and veg, while only a fifth of the risk is from alcohol, the report shows. For stomach cancer, a fifth of the risk comes from having too much salt in the diet, data suggests. Some cancers, like mouth and throat cancer, are caused almost entirely by lifestyle choices.
More BBC News - Over 40% of cancers due to lifestyle, says review
There's some promising news about breast cancer treatment. In clinical trials at Johns Hopkins Cancer Center in Baltimore, Maryland, doctors report they successfully pumped cancer-fighting medicine directly into a breast tumor. Early results show the treatment not only kills the tumor, but spares the patients disfiguring surgery and the side effects of more radical treatments. The earliest stages of breast cancer are usually discovered during a mammogram. Right now, the standard treatment when tumors are found is surgery, followed by radiation therapy and then hormone treatment. Some women who have a high risk of getting breast cancer even opt to have mastectomies - the surgical removal of one or both breasts - just to reduce their risk.
At Johns Hopkins Cancer Center in Baltimore, one oncologist has been studying a less radical approach. "Since most cancers originate within the breasts and the cells that line the milk ducts within the breasts, can we possibly eliminate those dangerous cells, and by doing so, eliminate breast cancer?" asks Dr. Vared Sterns. The idea is simple. Give a small concentration of a chemotherapy drug directly through the patient's nipple and into the milk ducts where cancer cells or even pre-cancerous cells are forming. The entire procedure takes about 30 minutes. In clinical trials, researchers found this technique was more effective and less toxic than the conventional practice of administering chemotherapy through the vein. "What we found was that the concentration of the drug within the breast was very, very high, while the concentration of the drug within the blood system was very low," said Sterns.
With conventional chemotherapy, the opposite was true: Drugs administered through the vein concentrated in the blood system and but were less concentrated where they were most needed - in the breast. The clinical trials have been so promising that this type of treatment might eventually become the standard for patients with very early stages of breast cancer or those who are at risk of developing it. "It is my hope that the treatment can be delivered in just your usual mammogram suite. This has been done in our study quite easily on an outpatient basis. It doesn't take very long. It's not painful," said Sterns.
She likens this procedure to a colonoscopy. If there's a polyp, the doctor removes it before it can become cancerous. Dr. Sterns said researchers need to find out how much of the drug is needed and how often it should be administered to rid the breast of cancer. She estimates that work will take another 10 years. Then, if this procedure is as promising as it seems, it may become standard treatment for patients with early stage breast cancer.
Source
If only diagnosing lung cancer were as easy as exhaling. It soon may be. This machine analyzes a person's breath and identifies the exact composition of the organic compounds in it. We all have chemicals in our breath and we think that the chemicals in breath of people with cancer are slightly different than those without cancer," said Dr. Peter Mazzone of the Cleveland Clinic.
Dr. Peter Mazzone led the study using breath analysis as a tool to diagnose lung cancer. He and his team of researchers tested the breath of 229 patients from Cleveland Clinic. Ninety-two of them had confirmed lung cancer and the others had high risk of developing it, with undefined growths in their lungs. We found that we could be in the 80-85% accuracy range at detecting lung cancer from the breath signature. We were a little more accurate if we looked for a very specific type of lung cancer rather than lung cancer in general. We found that we were able to characterize someones lung cancer that was in an advanced stage versus an early stage," he said.
Dr. Mazzone says the breath test also reveals how cancer is behaving. For example, the study shows aggressive cancers have a different breath bio-signature than cancers which are not so fast-moving. But the test will have to be refined before it can be widely adopted. This was relatively a crude instrument with lots of room for improvement so our hope is that the next generation of this sensor system can increase that accuracy beyond the 80- 85 percent range to a point where it can be clinically useful," said Dr. Mazzone.
At that point, the test could be used during regular health check-ups for early detection. It would be easier to administer, less invasive and less expensive than the currently available tests, biopsies and scans. Experts also hope that the breath test, when supplemented by a CAT scan, could help doctors quickly distinguish between benign and malignant tumors, so treatment could begin sooner.
Source
The team from La Trobe University in Melbourne says trials indicate shark antibodies can be a potent weapon against malaria and breast cancer. International pharmaceutical company Roche is funding Australian research into shark blood for six months. During that time scientists will try to determine if shark-blood antibodies are able to lock onto and neutralize cancer cells.
Shark antibodies are very small, which researchers say makes them particularly good at seeking out and binding to target cells. Thanks in part to funding from the Bill Gates Foundation, trials have already shown they can be an effective treatment against malaria. The research started a decade ago and a team from Melbournes La Trobe University has created the worlds first 'test-tube library' of millions of antibodies from shark blood that could fight cancer and other diseases. Trials into breast cancer have also started, work that will be accelerated following the deal with Roche.
There are several-thousand million different anti-bodies," explained associate professor Mick Foley, explaining the funding deal. "Really we have just got to find in our library one that will bind to their target and give that to them. We will license it to them," he explained. "But we are hoping that, you know, this is just a sort of vote of confidence, if you like, in big pharma (large pharmaceutical companies) that we have something interesting that might be very useful to the broader pharmaceutical industry."
Foley says his teams work could provide a breakthrough. "We are researching into sort of, for example, cancers," Foley said. "So, we have several antibodies that we are looking at, one of which we know in vitro, again in the laboratory, if you put it into breast cancer cells it will stop those breast cancer cells from growing. Sharks have immune systems similar to humans, but their antibodies - the molecules that actually fight disease - are different to human anti-bodies and are extremely resilient. The team in Melbourne found that shark antibodies can withstand high temperatures as well as extremely acidic or alkaline conditions.
Source
How close has cancer hit you or someone you love?
They say 1 out of 3 women will develop some form of cancer, and even tho it's not the number one killer of women (heart disease is), it ranks very high as the killer of men and women.
It kills more people than obesity. It kills more people than heart attacks/strokes.
I loathe fucking cancer, it's my only enemy in life........I am surrounded by it on both sides of my family and I have had to deal with it personally, in my own body~
I wish they would find something to help with this dreaded jackass disease. More and more children are being stricken with some form of cancer.
Instead of them getting closer to finding a cure, I hear about more and more cases~
I lost my best friend, my beautiful Mother to that damn disease in November 2005. Lung cancer, yes she smoked. They say there are 5 stages of grief, I sure hope to hell I would get to the final one, because I haven't yet, and truth be told, I doubt I ever will. She and I shared a bond like no other Mother and daughter you would see. Most people were jealous of us, we never fussed, always did things for each other, we were always there for each other. God what I wouldn't give to have my Mother here with me. Mother's days and her birthdays and Christmas are so damn hard. I am her only daughter, and so it was difficult for both of us, when she came home under Hospice care, because we both knew, the end was near.
Then I lost my Dad, my SF, to cancer in March 2008. Even tho he was so mean to me, I loved him and I forgave him for the many years of abuse. That's one thing about me, I am a very forgiving person. But he suffered terribly and I watched him die. My Mother went peacefully in her sleep, for that I am very thankful.
Then my Mother's favorite sister, my favorite Aunt, I lost her to cancer in February 2009. She sort of took over the role of my Mother after Mother left me. And she did a great job!
Also on my Mother's side, I lost my Grandfather to cancer, lung cancer- and my Grandmother to cancer (my Mother's parents) as well as Mother's oldest brother, he also passed away from cancer. And all of them, with the exception of my Aunt, they all passed away at the age of 66. My dear Aunt lived to be 68.
On my real Dad's side, even tho I didn't know him that well, he died at the age of 54, passed away from liver cancer.
And like I mentioned earlier, I have had the dreaded C word in my body, had to fight it for awhile, but I'm not about to give in, and so far, I'm doing great~
But I so loathe cancer, it sickens me.
Oral cancer cases are increasing, with 6,200 this year, figures from Cancer Research UK show, with two-thirds of cases in men. This compares with 4,400 cases a decade ago. Most cases are linked to smoking, but alcohol misuse and the human papillomavirus (HPV) infection through oral sex have been linked to the rise.
Experts said warning signs included mouth ulcers and red or white patches in the mouth that would not heal. Up to eight out of 10 people in the UK are infected with HPV at some point in their lives, though most cases are harmless. But high-risk strains of HPV are linked to oral cancers, as well as cervical and other genital cancers.
Dental checks
Richard Shaw, a Cancer Research UK (CRUK) expert in head and neck cancers based at the Liverpool Cancer Research UK Centre, said: "We have noticed that patients with HPV-related oral cancers tend to be younger, are less likely to be smokers and have better outcomes from treatment than those whose tumours show no evidence of HPV." Oral cancers usually take at least a decade to develop. Smoking rates have fallen significantly, though it is still the major cause of oral cancers.
Alcohol is another. CRUK says that, while overall consumption has fallen compared with 10 years ago, it could be that some groups are drinking more. But there have also been particularly sharp rises in the incidence rates of two specific types of oral cancer linked to HPV: tumours on the base of the tongue - which have risen by almost 90%- and tonsil cancers, which have seen a 70% rise.
Sara Hiom, director of information at Cancer Research UK, said: "It's worrying to see such a big rise in oral cancer rates. "But like many other cancers, if oral cancer is caught early, there is a better chance of successful treatment." She added: "It's not just doctors who have a vital role to play. If you're worried about any of these symptoms you can see your dentist as well."
BBC News - Oral cancer cases on the increase - Cancer Research UK
