Knowing from the outset that a particular woman’s prognosis is bad could allow doctors to give her aggressive treatment right away, but often it is difficult to know which breast cancer patients will do well and which will not.

The researchers analyzed networks of proteins — chemical compounds vital in cellular processes — in breast cancer tissue from about 350 women in the United States and Europe.

They found that women who survived the disease had a different organization of the network of proteins within the cancer cells than those who died.

Writing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, they said tracking these protein interactions enabled them to accurately predict in 82 percent of patients whether their breast cancer would kill them or not.

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But the same new research that infers this also suggests that the use of commonly prescribed blood pressure medicines might slow the development of those tumors and therefore improve these patients’ quality of life.

The study, the third by Ohio State University scientists in the last two years that looked for links between stress hormones and diseases like cancer, is published in the the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity.

Eric V. Yang, a research scientist at the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research (IBMR), exposed samples of three melanoma cell lines to the compound norepinephrine, a naturally occurring catecholamine that functions as a stress hormone. In times of increased stress, levels of norepinephrine increase in the bloodstream.

Yang and colleague Ronald Glaser were looking for changes in the levels of three proteins released by the cells. Glaser is a professor of molecular virology, immunology and medical genetics, member of the university’s Comprehensive Cancer Center and director of the IBMR.

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Mammographic screening is recommended to begin as early as 25 to 30 years of age in carriers of the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation, which increase the risk of developing breast cancer. However, it’s not clear what reduction in breast cancer mortality is needed with screening to offset the risks of radiation exposure, Dr. Amy Berrington de Gonzalez, from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, and colleagues explain.

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The message, perhaps: Hold off until middle age.

The study also found that frequent sexual activity in a man’s 40s appears to have little effect and even small levels of sexual activity in a man’s 50s could offer protection from the disease. Most of the differences were attributed to masturbation rather than sexual intercourse.

The study, led by the University of Nottingham, looked at the sexual practices of more than 431 men who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer before the age of 60, together with 409 controls who do not have prostate cancer.

Among men with prostate cancer, 34 percent had masturbated frequently in their 20s, compared to 24 percent among the control group. A similar spread was found for men in their 30s.

The results, based on questionnaires, are detailed in the journal BJU International (the British Journal of Urology).

The prostate gland secretes a milky fluid that mixes with sperm and seminal vesicle fluid to become semen. Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths among men in the United States, after lung cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 30,000 die from it each year.

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In a public statement released Monday, Jobs, 53, blamed the hormone imbalance for “‘robbing’ me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy.”

Jobs, said he will undergo a “relatively simple” treatment and will remain in charge of Apple. “Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis.”

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The consumption of coffee in Japan is relatively high, as is the rate of cancer of the esophagus in men. To look into any protective effect of coffee drinking, Dr. Toru Naganuma of Tohoku University, Sendai, and colleagues, analyzed data from the population-based Miyagi Cohort Study in Japan.

The study included information about diet, including coffee consumption. Among more than 38,000 study participants aged 40 to 64 years with no prior history of cancer, 157 cases of cancer of the mouth, pharynx and esophagus occurred during 13 years of follow up.
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Compared with people who did not drink coffee, those who drank one or more cups per day had half the risk of developing these cancers, Naganuma’s group reports in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

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1. Strength of association
2. Consistency (repeated observation)
3. Specificity (one agent, one result)
4. Temporality (exposure precedes effect)
5. Biological gradient (dose-response relation)

6. Plausibility (e.g., mechanisms)
7. Coherency (no serious conflict with the generally known facts of the natural history and biology of the disease)
8. Experimental verification (randomized, controlled trial)
9. Analogy with other causal relationships

The theory that solar ultraviolet radiation — and by extension, vitamin D, which is produced when such radiation strikes your skin — is a potent cancer fighter satisfies most, if not all, of the criteria. From a scientific point of view, therefore, vitamin D reduces the risk of many forms of cancer and increases survival rates once cancer reaches a detectable stage.

However, public policy often lags behind scientific research. It is to be hoped that the acceptance of the beneficial nature of vitamin D in reducing the risk of cancer and many other diseases will not have too much longer to wait. It is encouraging that the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine is currently embarking on a two-year study of vitamin D, and is expected to issue a report in 2010.

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Apartame and Brain Cancer

This video is a great review of the problems with aspartame.

The approval of aspartame was the most contested in FDA history. The sweetener was not approved on scientific grounds, but because of strong political and financial pressure.

Scientists in the UC Santa Barbara laboratories of Leslie Wilson, professor of biochemistry and pharmacology, and Mary Ann Jordan, adjunct professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, have shown how the healing power of these vegetables works at the cellular level. Their research is published in this month’s journal Carcinogenesis.

“Breast cancer, the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women, can be protected against by eating cruciferous vegetables such as cabbage and near relatives of cabbage such as broccoli and cauliflower,” said first author Olga Azarenko, who is a graduate student at UCSB. “These vegetables contain compounds called isothiocyanates which we believe to be responsible for the cancer-preventive and anti-carcinogenic activities in these vegetables. Broccoli and broccoli sprouts have the highest amount of the isothiocyanates.

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The girl is free of the BRCA1 gene, which raises the risk of breast cancer by up to 85 per cent and ovarian cancer by 60 per cent. She provides hope for wiping out many forms of the disease completely. Both her parents carried the gene and had a strong family history of the two cancers.

Her mother, who is 27, had seen many of her relatives hit by the disease, which affects 42,000 British women each year. Faulty genes inherited from parents cause up to ten per cent of these cases. Medics led by fertility expert Paul Serhal created 11 embryos through IVF, then screened them for BRCA1.

Two free from the flaw were implanted in the mother’s womb, and one survived. The baby was delivered at University College Hospital, London, two weeks ago.

The mother, who wanted to remain anonymous, said: “We felt that, if there was a possibility of eliminating this for our children, then that was a route we had to go down.” Dr Serhal has created babies free from genetic forms of bowel and eye cancer.

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