Sadly, a woman’s tragic story plays out in the real world more often than people may realize. When treating cancer can, at the same time, harm her baby, the choices can be horrendous.
chemotherapy
Given modern medical advances extending survival rates for chronic diseases, while at the same time overall life expectancy continues to lengthen, companies are diving into niche markets. Take, for example, Hormel — makers of Dinty Moore stews and Spam – which has come up with a meal line specifically targeted to cancer patients.
John McCain’s office released a statement from the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix, providing details of his Glioblastoma brain tumor. It was disclosed that the 80-year old senior Senator from Arizona was recovering from a surgical excision of a blood clot performed on July 14 that was discovered during a routine annual physical.
The fight against cancer has been one tough war. Perhaps the most difficult battle has been finding drugs that selectively kill cancer cells while sparing the rest. A research group at Washington University Medical School has come up with a very clever approach — starving the cancer cells.
A rare genetic disorder that transforms a person's hands and feet, in particular, into tree-bark-like warts and cutaneous horns made news recently. It's truly out of the ordinary. So what's this all about?
The concluding piece in this Brain Tumor series spotlights the expertise of Dr. Gregory Riggins. A professor of Neurosurgery and Oncology, and Director of the Brain Cancer Biology and Therapy Research Laboratory at Johns Hopkins, he will help us distinguish myth from reality.
Aside from occasional high-profile cases and Hollywood movies, brain tumors rarely take center stage. But when they do, it tends to be an ominous story. The CDC recently reported brain cancer surpassed leukemia as the most common cancer-causing death in children aged 1-19, but no age is safe. Here's the first of a two-part series elucidating fact from fiction.
Perhaps the most debilitating part of breast cancer treatment is chemotherapy. A new report by an international team of researchers suggests a means of more precisely determining which patients do or do not require chemotherapy.
Treating breast cancer with a very high dose of chemotherapy doesn’t improve survival any more than if a standard dose is used. And as guest writer Nicholas Wilcken writes, a recent paper has now capped decades of research debunking the idea that, if only we could give a high enough dose of chemotherapy, we could cure breast cancer.
Drexel University scientists have dressed their nanoparticle with tumor-fighting success, by using polyethylene glycol as an anchor for an enzyme to break down a tumor's extracellular matrix. That allows chemotherapy drugs to reach the tumor's core.
Metastatic cancer that is unresponsive to chemotherapy is considered incurable. But those days may be numbered, as scientists at the University of North Carolina may have uncovered the perfect system for delivering chemotherapy directly to the site of the cancer -- using a fraction of the conventional dose.
A recent seven-country study in JAMA evaluates approaches to cancer patient care in the last year of life. The findings were that the U.S. does unexpectedly well in several areas, but relies too much on ICU admission and chemotherapy at life's end, and too little on palliative care.