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Breast Reconstruction After Mastectomy Benefits Women Significantly Soon After Procedure

By on October 24th, 2011

Breast reconstruction performed on women after a mastectomy with tissue from their own body’s abdomen generally results in considerable psychological and social benefits, as well as sexual well being within three weeks of the procedure, researchers from the University of Toronto reported in the journal Cancer. The authors say their findings provide important new data for breast cancer survivors who are considering breast reconstruction.

Breast reconstruction following a mastectomy has two aims:
To restore the breast’s appearance
To improve the patient’s psychological health after cancer treatment
Before this study, it was not clear how successful such procedures were. Prior studies on the outcomes for patients who underwent breast reconstruction had mixed results.

Toni Zhong, MD, MHS, from Toronto University and researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City set out to determine more clearly what the mental and physical consequences might be for women who undergo two advanced forms of breast reconstruction surgery.

They surveyed 51 patients who underwent free MS-TRAM or DIEP flap reconstruction between June 2009 and November 2010. These two forms of breast reconstruction are becoming more popular in Europe and North America. The surgeon takes some tissue from the woman’s abdomen and reconstructs the breast with it. …source …more about breast cancer

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Vitamin E Supplements Increase Prostate Cancer Risk

By on October 24th, 2011

The results of a large, randomized trial suggest that taking daily vitamin E supplements may increase a man’s risk of prostate cancer. These results were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed type of cancer (other than skin cancer) in US men. Although many prostate cancers are diagnosed at an early, curable stage, treatment of prostate cancer can cause urinary, sexual, and bowel problems that have a substantial impact on quality of life. Prevention of prostate cancer, therefore, continues to be an important research priority.

There is a great deal of interest in the relationship between diet and cancer, and some previous studies suggested that selenium and vitamin E may reduce the risk of certain types of cancer, including prostate cancer.

To further explore the relationship between selenium and vitamin E supplementation and risk of prostate cancer, researchers conducted a randomized trial known as SELECT (the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial). The study enrolled more than 35,000 men from the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. At the start of the study, all the men had normal prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels and a normal digital rectal examination.

Study participants were assigned to one of four groups:

  1. Selenium supplementation (200 micrograms per day)
  2. Vitamin E supplementation (400 IU per day)
  3. Selenium and vitamin E supplementation
  4. Placebo

An initial report from this study (based on roughly five years of follow-up) found that risk of prostate cancer was higher in the vitamin E group than in the placebo group; this result did not meet the criteria for statistical significance, however, suggesting that it could have occurred by chance alone.[1] Nevertheless, because the results indicated that it was very unlikely that either vitamin E or selenium would provide a benefit, study participants were told to stop taking the supplements.

Although study participants stopped using the supplements in 2008, researchers continue to collect information from them. At the time of the current analysis, men had been followed for a minimum of 7 years.[2]

  • Men in the placebo group had the fewest prostate cancers. Prostate cancer was diagnosed in 529 men in the placebo group, 620 men in the vitamin E group, 575 men in the selenium group, and 555 men in the selenium plus vitamin D group.
  • Men in the vitamin E group were 17% more likely than men in the placebo group to be diagnosed with prostate cancer. This result was statistically significant (unlikely to be due to chance alone). The differences between the other study groups and the placebo group were not statistically significant.

These results suggest that daily vitamin E supplements may increase the risk of prostate cancer among healthy men. The researchers recommend that consumers be skeptical of health claims for unregulated over-the-counter products unless there’s strong evidence of a benefit from clinical trials.

References:

[1] Lippman SM, Klein EA, Goodman PJ et al. Effect of selenium and vitamin E on risk of prostate cancer and other cancers. The Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT). JAMA. 2009; 301:39-51.[2] Klein EA, Thompson IM, Tangen CM et al. Vitamin E and the risk of prostate cancer. The Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT). JAMA. 2011;306:1549-1556.

…source …more on prostate cancer

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Researchers Develop New Screening System to Find Brain Cancer Stem Cell Killers

By on October 20th, 2011

Researchers with UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have developed and used a high-throughput molecular screening approach that identifies and characterizes chemical compounds that can target the stem cells that are responsible for creating deadly brain tumors.

Glioblastoma is one of the deadliest malignancies, typically killing patients within 12 to 18 months. These brain cancers consist of two kinds of cells, a larger, heterogeneous population of tumor cells and a smaller sub-population of stem cells, which are treatment-resistant.

The screening system was specifically designed to find drugs that can target that sub-population and prevent it from re-seeding the brain cancer, said study senior author Dr. Harley Kornblum, a Jonsson Cancer Center scientist and a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences.

“We’re pleased that we can present a different way to approach the discovery of potential new cancer drugs,” said Kornblum, who also is a researcher with the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA. “And by finding these drugs, we may be able to reveal things about the biology of these cancer stem cells.”

The study appears in the Oct. 10 issue of Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Association of Cancer Research.

After testing more than 31,000 compounds from seven chemical libraries in an initial screen, the team came up with 694 that showed some activity against the brain cancer stem cells. After further narrowing the field down to 168 compounds, they decided to focus on four in future studies because they most successfully inhibited the brain cancer stem cells, Kornblum said.

What Kornblum and his team did in their approach was sort of a reverse of the usual screening processes. Typically, researchers doing high-throughput screening are seeking a drug to hit a specific target they know is on a cancer cell, perhaps a protein that is causing it to grow or a gene that keeps it from dying. In this case, Kornblum said, the team was basically shooting in the dark because the biology of these brain cancer stem cells is largely unknown.

“When brain cancer stem cells were first discovered, we all realized rapidly that we would need to find drugs that attack these cells specifically, because they’re resistant to our conventional therapies,” Kornblum said. “We needed a way to kill these stem cells.”

UCLA’s high-throughput screening technology is capable of screening as many as 100,000 compounds in a single day. Researchers generally develop cancer cells lines and then create an assay, a procedure in molecular biology to test or measure the activity of a drug or biochemical compound in an organic sample, in this case the cancer cells. …source …more on cancer treatment