Breast Cancer News and Research

Latest Breast Cancer News and Research

Breast cancer researchers call for ethnicity to be taken into account when developing treatments

Breast cancer research needs to investigate how a person's ethnicity influences their response to treatment and its outcome, according to a new Comment piece in today's Lancet by researchers from Imperial College London.

17 Jul 2008

You are not alone - help for breast cancer patients

Breast cancer is the most common female cancer in the UK, affecting one in nine women at some point in their life. The first patient-led DVD for women with breast cancer who are considering breast reconstruction will be launched today. It is hoped the DVD will change the way information is provided for women facing difficult surgical choices.

17 Jul 2008

Worldwide analysis of cancer survival finds wide variation between countries

Black men and women have substantially lower survival than white men and women in the United States, but US has the highest survival for prostate cancer of all 31 countries included.

16 Jul 2008

$2 million computer will help unravel major medical ailments

A federal grant will allow Johns Hopkins researchers to purchase a powerful $2 million computer that will speed up their efforts to find new ways to diagnose and treat brain disease, heart illnesses, cancer and other medical ailments.

16 Jul 2008

Improving understanding of cell behaviour in breast cancer

The invasion and spread of cancer cells to other parts of the body, known as metastasis, is a principal cause of death in patients diagnosed with breast cancer. Although patients with early stage, small, breast tumours have an excellent short term prognosis, more than 15 to 20 per cent of them will eventually develop distant metastases, and die from the disease. Vascular invasion - through lymphatic and blood vessels - is the major route for cancer spreading to regional lymph nodes and to the rest of the body.

15 Jul 2008

Health partnership expands cancer screening services

The Health Partnership of Monroe County, which evolved from the Women's Health Partnership, has expanded its free cancer screenings for women and men and now offers coverage for the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine.

15 Jul 2008

Quick formula could forecast which cancers chemo could kill

Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center have coined a simple formula that predicts how well a certain chemotherapy will work for targeting brain and other nervous system cancers. The formula, which publishes mid-July in Cancer Chemotherapy and Pharmacology, is pegged to two important proteins that compose such hard-to-kill tumors - one of which, ironically, makes them so drug-resistant in the first place.

15 Jul 2008

Researchers locate and image prostate cancer as it spreads to lymph nodes

Using an engineered common cold virus, UCLA researchers delivered a genetic payload to prostate cancer cells that allowed them, using Positron Emission Tomography (PET), to locate the diseased cells as they spread to the lymph nodes, the first place prostate cancer goes before invading other organs.

13 Jul 2008

Compound honokiol, from Magnolias blocks, elusive pathway for cancer growth

A natural compound from magnolia cones blocks a pathway for cancer growth that was previously considered "undruggable," researchers have found.

13 Jul 2008

Treating rare breast cancer with radiation therapy may lower recurrence rate

Patients with a rare type of breast cancer may benefit from receiving radiation therapy in addition to surgery to prevent recurrence, according to a study in the July issue of the International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics, the official journal of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology.

13 Jul 2008

Gene silencer and quantum dots reduce protein production to a whisper

More than 15 years ago, scientists discovered a way to stop a particular gene in its tracks. The Nobel Prize-winning finding holds tantalizing promise for medical science, but so far it has been difficult to apply the technique, known as RNA interference, in living cells.

9 Jul 2008

Swedish study finds many men not told wife's cancer incurable or told too late

A study conducted in Sweden found that more than 40 percent of widowers in that country whose wives died from cancer four or five years earlier reported they were either never told that their spouse's cancer was incurable, or they heard this information during the last week of her life.

9 Jul 2008

Post-operative asymmetry between breasts after cancer treatment affects quality of life

Most women with breast cancer assume that surgery to preserve their breast will be less disfiguring than a mastectomy that removes the entire breast.

9 Jul 2008

Young women's breast cancers more aggressive and less responsive to treatment

Young women's breast cancers tend to be more aggressive and less responsive to treatment than the cancers that arise in older women, and researchers at the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy may have discovered part of the reason why: young women's breast cancers share unique genomic traits that the cancers in older women do not exhibit.

9 Jul 2008

New online chat forum for cancer patients

Cancer Research UK today launches an online chat forum for cancer patients to swap stories and share experiences on how to cope with such a devastating disease.

8 Jul 2008

FDA approves novel genetic test for patients with breast cancer

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a novel genetic test for determining whether patients with breast cancer are good candidates for treatment with the drug Herceptin (trastuzumab).

8 Jul 2008

98 percent of elective mastectomy patients would have reconstruction again

Women who have breast reconstruction after an elective mastectomy are satisfied with their decision, have low complication rates and 98 percent would do it again, reports a study in July's Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).

8 Jul 2008