News

• View All News
• 
  

  Archive

• March 2012
• December 2010
• September 2010
• May 2010
• January 2010
• December 2009
• November 2009
• October 2009
• September 2009
• August 2009
• July 2009
• June 2009
• May 2009
• March 2009
• February 2009
• January 2009
• December 2008
• November 2008
• October 2008
• September 2008
• August 2008
• July 2008
• June 2008
• May 2008
• April 2008
• March 2008
• February 2008
• January 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007

Cancer Victors News

February 26, 2008

Cancer and Hormones

This week's news that a big drop in breast cancer cases might be due to millions of women going off menopause hormones may lead even more of them to abandon the pills. But doctors worry that women with severe menopausal symptoms will overreact to the risks and deny themselves the benefits of hormones. "There are some women who really require treatment. ... I worry that they will be talked out of it," said Dr. JoAnn Manson, a women's health expert at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Hormone use plummeted after a 2002 study found that it raised the risk of breast cancer, heart disease and other problems. Before that, the pills were thought to prevent many of those conditions, and doctors prescribed them as little fountains of youth. On Thursday, researchers reported that the rate of breast cancer in the United States dropped more than 7 percent in 2003, the year after that landmark study. The backlash against hormones is considered the leading explanation for the decline. Some women are still using hormone therapy "because their doctors genuinely believe that it prevents some diseases," said Dr. Isaac Schiff of Massachusetts General Hospital, who headed a panel for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that recommended in 2004 that doctors not withhold the treatment from women who truly need it. But that's not as many women as you might think, Manson said. About 2 million women start menopause each year in the United States, but only about one-fourth have moderate to severe symptoms lasting longer than four years, said Manson, whose new book, "Hot Flashes, Hormones & Your Health," includes a flowchart to help women decide whether to use hormones, which type and for how long. The key questions a woman should weigh: • Am I already at risk of heart disease, blood clots or breast cancer that would make hormones a bad idea? • Are my symptoms truly disrupting my life? One thing doctors agree on about hormone therapy: It works. Nancy Nixon used it for six years to treat headaches, night sweats and hot flashes until she was diagnosed with breast cancer 11 years ago. "It does make me feel sad" to no longer be able to use it, said Nixon, who manages the call-in line for Y-ME, a cancer support group. "But if someone said to me, `Chocolate causes breast cancer,' I would stop eating it even though I love it." Schiff said that when he tells patients of the potential breast cancer risk, "some go into a panic and say, `I'll just suffer.'" Manson called that unfortunate. "There are ways to reap those benefits and minimize the risk," she said. She and the gynecology group offer these suggestions: • Take the lowest dose for the shortest time — two or three years if possible. Start out small and add more medication if symptoms do not abate. • Do not take hormones to try to prevent heart disease; they don't. • Never take estrogen without progestin if you still have a uterus because that raises the risk of uterine cancer. • Try periodically to cut your dose and wean yourself off. "It's important that women do try to discontinue," and not just stay on the pills for many years, Manson said.

Posted 2/26/2008 12:25:00 PM

February 13, 2008

7.6 million died from cancer in 2007

The report, Global Cancer Facts & Figures, finds that 5.4 million of those cancers and 2.9 million deaths are in more affluent, developed nations, while 6.7 million new cancer cases and 4.7 million deaths hit people in developing countries.

"The point of the report is to promote cancer control worldwide, and increase awareness worldwide," said report co-author Dr. Ahmedin Jemal, director of the society's Cancer Occurrence Office.

The number of cancers and cancer deaths around the world is on the rise, Jemal said, mostly due to an aging population. "There is increasing life expectancy, and cancer occurs more frequently in older age groups," he noted.

Lifestyle may be another reason for the rise in malignancies in developing countries, Jemal said, as people adopt Western behaviors such as smoking, high-fat diets and less physical activity.

The best way to stem the increasing number of cancer cases and deaths is prevention, especially in poorer countries, the expert said. In many developing nations, the health-care infrastructure simply isn't there to offer cancer screening and treatment for most people, Jemal added.

In developed countries, the most common cancers among men are prostate, lung and colorectal cancer. Among women, the most common cancers are breast, colorectal and lung cancer, according to the report.

However, in developing countries the three most common cancers among men are lung, stomach and liver, and among women, breast, cervix uteri and stomach.

Worldwide, some 15 percent of all cancers are thought to be related to infections, including hepatitis (liver cancer) and human papilloma virus (cervical cancer). But the incidence of infection-related cancers remains three times higher in developing countries compared with developed countries (26 percent vs. 8 percent), according to the report.

In addition, cancer survival rates in many developing countries are far below those in developed countries. This is mostly due to the lack of early detection and treatment services. For example, in North America five-year childhood cancer survival rates are about 75 percent compared with three-year survival rates of 48 percent to 62 percent in Central America, the report notes. The report estimates that 60 percent of the world's children who develop cancer have little or no access to treatment.

The report also includes a section on the toll tobacco use takes around the world. In 2000, some 5 million people worldwide died from tobacco use. Of these, about 30 percent (1.42 million) died from cancer -- 850,000 from lung cancer alone.

Jemal believes smoking is a key culprit.

"Smoking prevalence is decreasing in developed countries. So, as tobacco companies are losing market in developed countries they are trying to expand their market in developing countries," he said.

In China alone, more than 350 million people smoke. "That's more than the entire population of the United States," Jemal said. "If these current patterns continue, there will be 2 billion smokers worldwide by the year 2030, half of whom will die of smoking-related diseases if they do not quit," he added.

In the 20th century, tobacco use caused about 100 million deaths around the world. In this century, that figure is expected to rise to over 1 billion people. Most of these will occur in developing countries.

One expert agreed that many cancer deaths can be avoided through lifestyle changes.

"What is most provocative here is not the total global burden of suffering and death cancer causes, dramatic though that may be, but the variations in cancer occurrence around the world, and the insights provided about how much of the cancer burden need not occur at all," said Dr. David Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine.

In developing countries, cancer of the uterine cervix is a leading cause of death in women, Katz noted.

"Yet this infection-related cancer is now preventable by vaccine, and long treatable when detected early using the Pap smear. As a result, death from cervical cancer in developed countries is dramatically lower. Its toll in the developing world is testimony to missed opportunities to apply our resources effectively, and equitably," he said.

Cancer of the liver, often related to hepatitis infection, is a leading cause of death in developing countries, but not so in developed countries. "Again, an infection preventable with vaccine is causing death because of inequities in the distribution and use of existing resources," Katz said.

Prostate and colon cancers are more common in wealthier countries, where they are likely related to poor diet and obesity, Katz said. "Unnecessary suffering and death are occurring in affluent countries due to dietary excesses," he said.

Katz also noted that tobacco-related cancer is largely preventable. "The toll of tobacco-related disease, including lung cancer, is an appalling example of a global willingness to tolerate preventable suffering and death for the sake of profit," he said.

These data show both developed and developing countries how to move toward the lower rates of specific cancers, Katz said.

"It will be a tragic failure for public health if instead of applying these lessons developed countries continue to export tobacco and dietary transgressions so that the developing world adds to its current cancer burden ours as well," he said.

More information

Posted 2/13/2008 12:01:00 PM

February 13, 2008

Cancer and the Normal Maintenance Cells

- Cancers can spread through the body by following normal maintenance cells that unwittingly blaze a trail for tumor cells to follow.

The unexpected finding comes from studies by Erik Sahai, PhD, and colleagues at London-based Cancer Research UK.

Previously, scientists thought that a tumor spread only after cells in the tumor acquired the ability to push through surrounding tissues -- the extracellular matrix. But Sahai and colleagues now show that normally immobile tumor cells move through the extracellular matrix by following normal cells called fibroblasts.

Fibroblasts make and maintain the extracellular matrix. As part of their job, they push through the matrix. Tumor cells, Sahai's team finds, follow the trail the fibroblasts leave behind. This allows the cancer to spread through the body.

The fibroblasts did not make a trail when the researchers blocked certain chemical messengers the cells leave behind. This made it impossible for the cancer cells to follow them.

"This adds to the complexity of how we should think of treatment in terms of what cells we really should target -- the fibroblasts or the cancer cells themselves," Sahai tells WebMD. "This makes us think about anti-invasion strategies in a different way. We need not just consider the cancer cells but the contribution made by their cellular environment."

In their experiments, Sahai and colleagues looked at squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) cells. But they note that other types of cancer cells -- for example, breast and intestinal cancers -- are also able to follow the trails left behind by normal mobile cells.

Posted 2/13/2008 11:44:00 AM

February 12, 2008

Immune System and Cancer....the link between the Two

'Startling' Findings

In Nature, scientists show that a healthy immune system may hold some cancers in check.

The results may pave the way for the development of new therapies to "convert cancer into a controllable chronic disease," write the researchers.

They injected a cancer-causing substance into mice. Some mice developed growing tumors, while other mice developed tumors that stayed small.

But those small, stable tumors started to grow when the scientists suppressed the mice's immune systems.

The bottom line: A healthy immune system helps prevent cancer, though it didn't stop every small tumor from growing.

The researchers included graduate student Catherine Koebel and Robert Schreiber, PhD, of the pathology and immunology department at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Their findings are "startling" and "demonstrate that considering cancer as a fatal disease is not always appropriate," writes Cornelius Melief, MD, PhD, in a Nature editorial.

Melief works at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Cancer Defies Immune System

Sometimes, cancer flies under the immune system's radar, a British study shows.

The study focuses on immune system cells called regulatory T-cells (T-regs) and their effect on macrophages in test tubes.

Macrophages normally help the body get rid of threats. But under the sway of T-regs, macrophages act the opposite way. Instead of going on defense, the macrophages chill out, as if there were no cause for concern.

That process could open the door for tumor growth, note the researchers, who included Leonie Taams, PhD, of King's College London.

"We hope to be able to use this new knowledge about the relationship between regulatory T-cells and macrophages to find more effective treatments for tumors," Taams says in a news release.

Posted 2/12/2008 11:59:00 AM

February 12, 2008

Mesalamine Related With Decreased Colorectal Cancer Rates

A study presented at the 72nd Annual Scientific Meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology has indicated that the use of mesalamine among patients with inflammatory bowel disease is associated with a decrease in the incidence of colorectal cancer when compared to cases and controls. The research was conducted by scientists at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who matched 16 patients with ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease to 23 controls with similar body mass index, family history of IBD, family history of colorectal cancer and smoking.

Among those with ulcerative colitis who did not get colorectal cancer, researchers found that 100 percent used mesalamine. While among those with UC who developed colorectal cancer only 76.9 percent used mesalamine. “This finding suggests an association between mesalamine use and reduced risk of colorectal cancer,” according to Jeffrey Tang, M.D. Dr. Tang and his colleagues, including Ann L. Silverman, M.D., conducted conditional logistic regression analysis which revealed that at doses greater than 5068 grams mesalamine use in patients with IBD was associated with an 89 percent reduction in risk of colorectal cancer, compared to IBD patients matched for other major risk factors. While these are provocative findings, it should be noted that this is a small study and further investigation is needed on the chemoprevention potential of mesalamine.

Patients with inflammatory bowel disease including ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease are at significantly higher than average risk for colorectal cancer and should be screened for colorectal cancer according to accepted guidelines, which recommend more frequent screening among those with IBD. However, some research suggests this is not happening.
In another study conducted at the University of California, San Francisco and Kaiser Permanente of Northern California and presented at the ACG Annual Meeting, researchers looked at rates of participation in colorectal cancer screening by patients with IBD in an integrated health system with access to colonoscopy. An intensive program of colonoscopic screening and surveillance is recommended to prevent colorectal cancer in patients with ulcerative colitis, who are at higher than average risk.

In this study of 358 patients with ulcerative colitis who were eligible for screening, only one third were screened once during the period 2001 to 2005. Of these 123 patients, only 52 percent had an additional surveillance colonoscopy within the recommended period of one to two years. Overall, only 18 percent of the eligible patients at high risk for colorectal cancer due to history of ulcerative colitis adhered to recommended surveillance guidelines.

Posted 2/12/2008 11:19:00 AM

February 7, 2008

Breast Cancer and Alcohol Use

Posted 2/7/2008 8:47:00 AM

February 7, 2008

Legacy of Deficits will Constrain Bush's Successor

WASHINGTON -- George W. Bush took office in 2001 with budget surpluses projected to stretch years into the future. But it's almost certain that when he returns to Texas next year, the president will leave behind a trail of deficits and debt that will sharply constrain his successor.

On Monday, the president will unveil a $3 trillion-plus budget request for his final year, which is likely to show a deficit of more than $400 billion. New details of the budget emerged yesterday, with officials saying the White House plans to keep a lid on nonsecurity discretionary spending. It wants to cut about $200 billion from the government's medical programs for seniors and the poor. (See related story.)

The longer-term picture is darker. Despite his efforts, Mr. Bush failed to work out a deal with Congress to tackle the spiraling costs of government health and retirement programs. The next president, if he or she serves two terms, could find the U.S. government so deeply in hock that it would face losing its Triple-A credit rating, something that has never happened since Moody's Investors Service began grading U.S. securities in 1917.

As a result, the ambitions of Mr. Bush's successor to cut taxes, institute universal health care or aid troubled homeowners might have to give way to the reality of soaring costs for Social Security, the Medicare program for the elderly and the Medicaid program for the poor.

"We kicked this can down the road about as long as it can be," Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, said at a hearing this week. "It will absolutely bedevil the next administration."

Republicans, in particular those to the right of the president on fiscal matters, are vocal in criticizing the increases in spending that Congress and President Bush have carried out over the last seven years. Sen. John McCain, the leading Republican presidential contender, told reporters recently that while history hasn't made a final judgment on President Bush, it will "judge him harshly on the spending point of view."

The president's critics say his failings are twofold: He has squandered surpluses that could have helped pay down the $5 trillion federal debt. And he has let two terms pass without persuading Congress to take action that would preserve the government's social programs. According to the Concord Coalition, a fiscal watchdog group, the shortfall in Social Security and Medicare through 2080 will total $72.3 trillion, a number that dwarfs the impact of Mr. Bush's spending and tax cuts.

Mr. Bush's defenders say he did the best he could in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, and that he has recently tightened up on spending. The budget deficit in fiscal 2004 measured 3.6% of gross domestic product; last year it narrowed to 1.2% of GDP, low by historical standards. The deficit is expected to rise to 2.5% of GDP, or about $350 billion, this fiscal year, assuming Congress passes an expected economic-stimulus package.

"You could say, 'Gee, he inherited surpluses and now we have a deficit,'" said Rob Portman, the former head of the White House budget office under Mr. Bush. "On the other hand, you could say he inherited a recession" in 2001. Mr. Portman called the country's fiscal health "relatively strong" and said the president has left a solid base for "the next president and the next Congress to deal with the real problem, which is the unsustainable growth in mandatory spending."

In his State of the Union address this week, Mr. Bush signaled he wasn't going to use his last year trying to revamp entitlement programs. Instead, he called on lawmakers to "offer your proposals and come up with a bipartisan solution."

When Mr. Bush took the oath of office in 2001, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected $5.6 trillion in federal budget surpluses through 2011. Through most of his tenure, the president managed to have his guns, butter and tax cuts without creating enormous budget deficits, at least as measured by their share of GDP. One reason was a surprise increase in federal tax receipts from corporations over the last couple of years. Now those revenues have flattened out and the economy is teetering on the edge of recession.

Mr. Bush and Congress, meanwhile, increased federal spending by 25% between 2001 and 2007, adjusted for inflation, according to Brian Riedl of the conservative Heritage Foundation. By Sept. 30, the U.S. will have spent almost $800 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A new Medicare prescription-drug benefit for seniors costs almost $80 billion a year. Mr. Bush's signature tax cuts, in 2001 and 2003, sapped tax receipts and sliced the projected budget surplus by about $1.7 trillion through 2011, according to the CBO.

Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, a former Bush economic adviser says the seniors' drug program was "a step in the wrong direction from the standpoint of fiscal imbalance."

Phill Swagel, assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy, says the president has had a "pro-growth agenda" and "tried to take the right steps" on long-term fiscal problems, albeit with limited success.

Mr. Bush came into office in 2001 vowing to save Social Security from financial ruin. "My opponent completely ignores the long-term problems of Social Security," he said of Democratic nominee Al Gore during a New Mexico campaign stop in the waning days of the 2000 campaign. Eventually, the retirement bills for baby boomers would come due, he warned. "And our children and grandchildren will pay them with massive new taxes."

In 2005, Mr. Bush tried to tackle Social Security, on the theory that it should be easier to fix than Medicare. The latter is more expensive, and salvaging it would require the government to find a way to stem rising medical costs.

Mr. Bush approached the subject from a free-market point of view, calling on Congress to divert some of the Social Security payroll tax into individual investment accounts. Many Democrats and seniors saw it as an attempt to kill the program rather than fix it.

"The president put a proposal on the table, and I think he gets credit for that," says Alice Rivlin, President Clinton's budget director and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. "But he wasn't willing to negotiate with the Congress to make it a serious proposal that both sides could accept. And Congress wasn't ready to negotiate."

Last year, Mr. Bush asked Congress to slow the rate of growth of Medicare spending, aiming to cut $8 trillion from the program's $34 trillion unfunded obligations over the next 75 years. But the president couldn't win congressional support.

Doomsayers have been warning for years of an approaching tsunami of health and retirement costs. What has changed is that the next president will actually have to confront the doom.

This year, the first of 78 million Baby Boomers hit retirement age and become eligible for early benefits, at a pace of 7,776 a day. Barring radical changes, in the final year of the next president's first term, 47.8% of the federal budget will cover the costs of Medicare, Medicaid, the Social Security retirement program and a smaller children's health insurance program, according to projections by the Office of Management and Budget. Today those programs consume 41.5% of the budget.

Ratings agency Moody's has warned that it could eventually downgrade its rating of U.S. debt unless there's a sharp change of course with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The government's triple-A rating allows it to borrow cheaply and sets the benchmark for global financial markets.

In 1999, Moody's started a series of five downgrades of Japanese government debt after the debt reached 90% of the entire economy. "That could happen in the United States if these programs aren't reformed" as 2020 nears, says Moody's Vice President Steven Hess.

Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist and adviser to Sen. Barack Obama, says that Mr. Bush has left his successor with little wiggle room. Sen. Obama has called for allowing some of the Bush tax cuts to expire as scheduled in 2010. Mr. Obama has also said he would like to remove the salary cap on the payroll taxes that fund Social Security.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, the other contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, identifies spending cuts or tax increases that she says would pay for almost every campaign initiative. For instance, she says she'd pay for a $10 billion-a-year universal preschool education plan by cutting the ranks of federal contractors by 500,000 and cracking down on no-bid government contracts. Mr. Bush "has rightly earned the legacy of being our nation's most fiscally irresponsible president," says Brian Deese, deputy economic director for the Clinton campaign. "As a result, the next president is going to have to deal with that."

Mr. McCain, the Republican front-runner, hasn't laid out a plan to deal with the looming fiscal crunch. But he has suggested that better-off seniors be required to pay more for drugs and outpatient visits, as a way of controlling Medicare costs. Distancing himself from the current administration and his party, Mr. McCain also calls for drug re-importation from Canada and negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies.

Posted 2/7/2008 7:54:00 AM

February 4, 2008

DIET AND CANCER

Broccoli sprouts, cabbage, ginkgo biloba and garlic appear to have a role in preventing a variety of cancers, researchers report.

The research, which focuses on chemical interactions between compounds found in foods and the body's cells and DNA, suggests the addition of these foods to the diet can confer health benefits, the researchers said.

The findings were to be presented Monday at the American Association for Cancer Research's meeting, in Baltimore.

In the first study, Akinori Yanaka and colleagues from the University of Tsukuba in Japan found that in 20 people, a diet rich in broccoli sprouts significantly reduced Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infection. H. pylori, a bacterium, is a cause of gastritis -- inflammation of the stomach lining -- and is a major factor in peptic ulcer and stomach cancer, the researchers said.

"Even though we were unable to eradicate H. pylori, to be able suppress it and relieve the accompanying gastritis by means as simple as eating more broccoli sprouts is good news for the many people who are infected," Yanaka said in a prepared statement.

Sulforaphane, a chemical found in broccoli sprouts, appears to be the active cancer-fighting agent. Sulforaphane apparently helps cells defend against oxidants, the highly reactive and toxic molecules that damage DNA and kill cells and potentially lead to cancer, the researchers noted.

Another study with broccoli sprouts found that when an extract from the sprouts was applied to the skin of hairless mice, it counteracted carcinogenic responses to ultraviolet light exposure, a cause of skin cancer.

"Just when we stopped exposing the mice to UV light, we started applying broccoli sprout extract," said Albena T. Dinkova-Kostova, a postgraduate fellow at Johns Hopkins University. "We found that only 50 percent of mice treated with the extract developed tumors, compared with 100 percent of the mice not treated with the extract," she said.

"The topical application of this extract could be developed to be a potential agent against UV light-induced skin cancer," she added.

Dinkova-Kostova's team is studying whether ingesting broccoli sprouts for the sulforaphane might also work in protecting mice from getting skin cancer. Her hope is to see if either ingested or topical sulforaphane can protect people from skin cancer. "This strategy is probably worthwhile to be developed for protection in humans," she said.

In the third study, researchers suggest that cabbage and sauerkraut may protect women from breast cancer.

Data collected from the U.S. component of the Polish Women's Health Study showed an association between eating cabbage and sauerkraut and a lower risk of breast cancer. The effect seemed to be highest among women who eat high amounts starting in adolescence and continue to do so throughout adulthood. The most protective effect appeared to come from raw or briefly cooked cabbage, the researchers said.

"The observed pattern of risk reduction indicates that the breakdown products of glucosinolates in cabbage may affect both the initiation phase of carcinogenesis -- by decreasing the amount of DNA damage and cell mutation -- and the promotion phase -- by blocking the processes that inhibit programmed cell death and stimulate unregulated cell growth," lead researcher Dorothy Rybaczyk-Pathak, a professor of epidemiology at the University of New Mexico, said in a prepared statement.

In the fourth study, researchers from Brigham and Woman's Hospital in Boston found that ginkgo biloba appears to lower the risk of developing ovarian cancer.

"There are herbal supplements used in the treatment of cancer, although there is not much scientific evidence to support their use," said lead researcher Bin Ye. "Our study looked at ginkgo use in women with and without cancer.

"We found in a population-based study that 4.2 percent of cancer-free women reported taking ginkgo biloba regularly," Ye said. "However, only 1.6 percent of women with ovarian cancer reported taking ginkgo regularly."

In laboratory studies, the researchers found that compounds in ginkgo biloba -- ginkgolide A and B -- were the most active components contributing to this protective effect. "We found that the proliferation rates in certain types of cancer cells was inhibited by 80 percent," Ye said.

"This combination of population and laboratory studies suggests that ginkgo biloba may have value for the prevention of cancer," Ye said.

In the final study, researchers found that garlic may help ward off carcinogens produced by meat cooked at high temperatures. Cooking meats and eggs at high temperatures releases a chemical called PhIP, which may be a carcinogen.

Studies have shown that breast cancer is higher among women who eat large amounts of meat, although fat and caloric intake and hormone exposure may contribute to this increased risk, the researchers reported.

However, diallyl sulfide (DAS), a flavor component of garlic, appears to inhibit the effects of PhIP that can cause DNA damage or transform substances in the body into carcinogens.

"We treated human breast epithelial cells with equal amounts of PhIP and DAS separately, and the two together, for periods ranging from three to 24 hours," Ronald D. Thomas, associate professor of basic sciences at Florida A&M University, said in a statement. "PhIP induced expression of the cancer-causing enzyme at every stage, up to 40-fold, while DAS completely inhibited the PhIP enzyme from becoming carcinogenic," he said.

"The finding demonstrates for the first time that DAS triggers a gene alteration in PhIP that may play a significant role in preventing cancer, notably breast cancer, induced by PhIP in well-done meats," the researchers reported.

All of these findings come on the heels of a sixth study, reported in last week's issue of The Lancet, that found that people with a genetic susceptibility to lung cancer could cut their risk for the disease by eating vegetables from the cabbage family.

"We found protective effects with at least weekly consumption of cruciferous vegetables," said lead researcher Paul Brennan of the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France.

One expert said the results of the six studies are interesting. And while it may be some time before they have any practical applications for people, that should not stop us from adding more vegetables and fruits to our diet.

"An extensive body of epidemiologic evidence suggests consistently, if not decisively, that generous consumption of fruits and vegetables is associated with reduced cancer risk," said Dr. David L. Katz, an associate professor of public health and director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine.

Further study should provide "a clearer picture both of what foods reduce cancer risk, and how," Katz said. "Understanding in each of these areas will lead to new insights in the other. A refined ability to use diet in the prevention of cancer will ensue."

"That is an exciting prospect," he added. "But excitement about what may come should not distract from what is already in hand. Even with gaps in our knowledge, the case for increasing fruit and vegetable consumption to promote health and prevent disease -- cancer included -- is compelling and strong."

Posted 2/4/2008 12:20:00 PM

• Home |
• Forum |
• Community |
• Resources |
• Support this Site |
• About

Copyright 2013. All Rights Reserved.