f there is one thing you can say about science and medicine it s that it is always changing. Bacterial infections used to be easily treatable. Now antibiotics don t work in many cases. AIDS was a certain death sentence 20 years ago. Now HIV-infected people have life spans that are not too different from non-infected individuals.
breast cancer
Top stories: Mammography guidelines questioned, so-called pediatricians jumping on anti-vaccine bandwagon, and the sour news on Vitamin D, again.
A new Pfizer-developed anti-cancer drug the first member of a new class of oncology drugs provided a longer progression-free period compared to the control group. Women with advanced
Drs. Lydia Pace and Nancy Keating of Boston s Brigham and Women s Hospital examined data from studies on mammography, especially the most recent ones. Because breast cancer is the second most common cause of cancer death in American women, and guidelines for mammography use have been changing, they reviewed the data on mammography benefits and harms.
Major study of screening mammography confirms what we have been told, over and over: routine screening for breast cancer saves few (if any) lives and the costs financial, medical and emotional are huge.
Breast cancer is very uncommon in younger women. According to the National Cancer Institute, one in 227 30-year-old women will
In recent years a surprising amount of the orthodoxy of modern medicine has been challenged, and this has resulted in some counterintuitive, even surprising findings.
For example, the PSA test for detecting prostate cancer is so flawed that some healthcare professionals are in favor of doing away with it entirely. The primary reason: too many false positives, leading to unnecessary (and very invasive) procedures, with very few lives actually saved.
The U.S. Preventive Service Task Force (USPSTF) evaluates evidence and provides screening guidelines for a number of diseases, including breast cancer. It has just updated its previous guidelines for breast cancer screening in women who have no personal history of cancer, but have a family history that indicates an increased likelihood of potentially harmful BRCA-related cancers.
Anastrozole, a drug that blocks estrogen production in postmenopausal women, has been shown to be effective in reducing a woman s risk of developing breast cancer, especially if she is at an elevated risk. This preventive approach may help to reduce mastectomies.
According to the American Cancer Society and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, the use of breast MRI should be limited to those women who have a greater than 20 percent lifetime risk of breast cancer, or for further evaluation of indeterminate lesions. Furthermore, MRI is not recommended for new cancer diagnoses or
October is breast cancer awareness month. Many of us want to donate to help reduce its dreaded toll. But be careful to whom you donate: some groups just take your money and use it to promote an agenda having nothing to do with breast cancer research.
Each year, about 220,000 individuals are diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer, according to Genentech. For those 15,000 patients eligible for preoperative treatment