Personal website chronicling improves depressive symptoms in women with breast cancer
8/14/2013
Adults increasingly are conveying their personal experience with serious disease online, but do such chronicles help the authors or their audience? In the first known study of its kind, UCLA researchers have discovered that creating a personal website to chronicle the cancer experience and communicate with the author's interpersonal circle can reduce depressive symptoms, incre...
Aggressive "triple-negative" breast cancers may be sensitive to drugs that clog their waste disposal
8/14/2013
In a new paper in Cancer Cell, a team led by Judy Lieberman, PhD, of Boston Children's Hospital's Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine reports "triple-negative" breast cancers may be vulnerable to drugs that attack the proteasome. This cellular structure acts as the cell's waste disposal, breaking down damaged or unneeded proteins...
A new study led by a University of Colorado Cancer Center member recently published in the journal reveals that in young, female cancer survivors, quality of life is significantly impaired long after treatment. The study compared 59 cancer survivors to 66 healthy controls and found that, as expected, cancer survivors showed higher stress and anxiety than the general population...
Cancer cells change while moving throughout body
8/14/2013
For the majority of cancer patients, it's not the primary tumor that is deadly, but the spread or "metastasis" of cancer cells from the primary tumor to secondary locations throughout the body that is the problem. That's why a major focus of contemporary cancer research is how to stop or fight metastasis...
Research suggests neural stem cells may regenerate after anti-cancer treatment
8/14/2013
Scientists have long believed that healthy brain cells, once damaged by radiation designed to kill brain tumors, cannot regenerate...
Seeking a clinical test for breast cancer
8/14/2013
An international scientific collaborative led by the Harvard Stem Cell Institute's Kornelia Polyak, MD, PhD, has discovered why women who give birth in their early twenties are less likely to eventually develop breast cancer than women who don't, triggering a search for a way to confer this protective state on all women...
Bowel cancer patients to benefit from metabolic 'fingerprinting' of tumors
8/14/2013
It is possible to see how advanced a bowel cancer is by looking at its metabolic 'fingerprint', according to new research. Bowel cancer is the third most common type of cancer globally, with over one million new cases diagnosed every year. Accurately determining the stage that a tumour has reached is crucial for deciding which treatments to offer...
Tumor suppressor may provide clues for improved treatment for neuroblastoma
8/14/2013
Loss of a gene required for stem cells in the brain to turn into neurons may underlie the most severe forms of neuroblastoma, a deadly childhood cancer of the nervous system, according to a Ludwig Cancer Research study. Published in Developmental Cell, the findings also provide clues about how to improve the treatment of this often-incurable tumor...
Potential new anti-cancer target: 'dark-horse' molecule
8/14/2013
Australian researchers have identified a molecule called interleukin-11 as a potential new target for anti-cancer therapies. Until now, the importance of interleukin-11 in cancer development has been underestimated, but researchers have recently identified this molecule as a 'dark horse' for the development of cancer...
'Molecular flashlight' developed that illuminates brain tumors in mice
8/14/2013
In a breakthrough that could have wide-ranging applications in molecular medicine, Stanford University researchers have created a bioengineered peptide that enables imaging of medulloblastomas, among the most devastating of malignant childhood brain tumors, in lab mice...