Stand Up To Cancer

If you're anything like me, you're probably exhausted from trying to keep up with all the various permutations the economic stimulus package has been through in the past couple of weeks. But whether you support the stimulus or not, it does contain some good news - the NIH is getting $10 billion in funding, and 85% of that is earmarked for research!
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/12/stimulus/index.html

File this one under "bizarre": Japanese researchers have created what they call a "living doll" made out of human liver cancer cells. It looks like something out of the Blair Witch Project, but it could one day allow new drugs to be tested in conditions much like those inside the human body - without putting any actual humans at risk.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126946.400-living-doll-made-of-human-cancer-cells.html

Bad news for pot smokers - well, male pot smokers, anyway. A new study indicates that smoking marijuana or hash once a week for an extended period doubles your chance of getting testicular cancer. And that's not all - the drug could also decrease sperm quality, decrease testosterone levels and cause impotency. Yikes!
http://blogs.usatoday.com/betterlife/2009/02/testicular-canc.html

Meanwhile, new research shows that a drug commonly used to treat bone loss has an unintended side effect - it can reduce the odds that some breast cancers will spread or recur by a third. Zoledronic acid reduced recurrences and metastases by 36% in a study of 1,800 premenopausal women, and researchers elsewhere are checking to see if it has a similar impact on patients with prostate and lung cancer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/health/research/12bone.html?ref=health

Someone deep in the bowels of the NCI screwed up this week. The agency launched a new, interactive online tool designed to help older Americans assess their colon cancer risk. Unfortunately, the tool only works for white folks; if you tell it you're not white, it tells you it can't help. Ironic, considering black people have a much higher risk of developing the disease.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/health/12cancer.html?ref=health

Most people have a jumbo-sized bottle of multivitamins in their medicine cabinets, and pop the oversized pills once a day in hopes of warding off everything from the common cold to cancer. But new research shows that multivitamins don't lower cancer risk in older women. And they don't do anything about heart attacks or strokes, either. "Population studies have shown that if you eat fruits and vegetables, your chances of cancers are relatively low compared to people with deficient diets," said Aditya Bardia, an oncology fellow at Johns Hopkins University. "But when they tried to convert those nutrients into tablets, that's where the failure has been."
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/02/10/multivitamins.cancer/

Finally, I loved this article in Forbes about "cancer miracles" - patients who miraculously recover from cancers that their doctors thought were terminal. One patient profiled was given two months to live in 2005, only to have his liver tumor vanish completely without treatment. Now scientists are focusing on what is different about "miracle patients" in hopes of finding new ways to tackle their research.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0302/074_cancer_miracles.html

That's all for this week, but I'll be back next Thursday with more recommended reading!

--Cat