Category Archives: Cancer Care Tips

Cancer Care Tips, Cancer Research

Study Finds No Evidence that Mammograms Save Lives

Mammogram
Mammogram

In the ongoing debate on the effectiveness of mammograms as a breast cancer screening tool, a new study found no evidence that annual mammograms save lives. In what is considered the most rigorous and comprehensive study on the effectiveness of mammograms to date, Canadian researchers tracked 90,000 women between the ages of 40 and 59 over a 25-year period. Women were randomly assigned to have mammograms with physical breast exams or breast exams alone. The study found that mammograms had absolutely no impact on breast cancer mortality. According to a Fox News report, the same number of women in each group died of breast cancer, whether or not they had received annual mammograms.

Mammograms have been considered an important breast cancer screening tool for decades. The assumption has been that lives could be saved by detecting and treating breast cancer early. In reality, the study found that 1 in 5 cancers discovered through mammography and subsequently treated posed no threat to the woman’s health but did unnecessarily subject her to the pain and expense of surgery, chemotherapy and/or radiation. Researchers concluded that there was no advantage to finding breast cancers before they were large enough to feel during physical examination.

Cancer overtreatment has been hot button public issue over the past year. This isn’t the first cancer screening test called into question. There has also been considerable debate about the value of prostate cancer screenings for men. In many cases, researchers have found that men are undergoing unnecessary surgery or radiation treatment for cancers that would never have impacted their health during their lifetime.

Considering the likelihood of unnecessary treatment, as pointed out by the Canadian study, women diagnosed with breast cancer might want to consider non-toxic alternative cancer treatment instead of undergoing more radical and physically damaging treatment.

Alternative Cancer Treatment, Cancer Care Tips, News

New Study Shows Value of Vitamin C in Treating Cancer

Vitamin C Against Cancer
Vitamin C Against Cancer

Nearly half a century after Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling suggested that large doses of vitamin C (ascorbate) could be effective in preventing and treating cancer, a new study indicates that vitamin C may indeed be a valuable alternative cancer treatment. In a study recently published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, researchers at the University of Kansas Medical Center found that intravenous administration of high doses of vitamin C increased the cancer-killing effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs in mice and significantly decreased chemotherapy’s toxic side effects in people.

The recent research would seem to vindicate Pauling’s claims about vitamin C which were largely discredited by practitioners of Western medicine in the 1970s when they were unable to document Pauling’s claims in clinical trials.

“There’s been a bias since the late 1970s that vitamin C cancer treatment is worthless and a waste of time. We’re overcoming that old bias,” study co-author Dr. Jeanne Drisko, director of integrative medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center, told the Los Angeles Times.

The difference in results between previous studies and the latest research may lay in the method of delivering vitamin C. In studies conducted in the 1970s patients took vitamin C orally in pill form. University of Kansas researchers administered the vitamin intravenously.

“When you swallow a pill or eat an orange, vitamin C is absorbed at a certain rate by the gut and excreted very quickly by the kidneys, Drisko explained. “But when you give it intravenously, you override that. Plasma levels can get very high.”

The new development is one more example of alternative cancer treatments that were not “wrong,” just ahead of their time!

Cancer Care Tips, Cancer Research, Living with Cancer

New Study: Antioxidants Might Speed Lung Cancer

Antioxidants and Cancer
Antioxidants and Cancer

A new study calls into question one of the most widely accepted beliefs about cancer prevention: Eating foods that are rich in antioxidants can help decrease cancer risk. Not necessarily, say researchers at the University of Gothenburg Sahlgrenska Cancer Center in Sweden. Antioxidants may actually increase lung cancer risk for smokers and people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Antioxidants are supposed to protect the body from cancer by preventing free radicals from damaging cells. “These radicals can damage almost anything inside the cell, including DNA, and DNA damage can lead to cancer,” explained study leader Dr. Martin Bergo. By neutralizing free radicals, antioxidants should decrease the possibility of DNA damage and cancer risk.

However, Swedish researchers found that in people with cancerous or precancerous cells, the body’s response to antioxidants appears to backfire. Instead protecting, antioxidants short-circuit a key immune response to cancerous cells, accelerating cancer progression, according to a HealthDay report posted on WebMD.

The study tested response to vitamin E and acetylcysteine, an antioxidant supplement, in mice with early lung cancer. “We found that antioxidants caused a threefold increase in the number of tumors and caused tumors to become more aggressive,” Dr. Bergo said. “Antioxidants caused the mice to die twice as fast, and the effect was dose-dependent.”

The findings are of concern not only because they fly in the face of current cancer prevention recommendations, but also because acetylcysteine is commonly used to improve breathing in COPD patients. Until further testing can be done, researchers recommend that people at risk of lung cancer avoid taking antioxidant supplements. Issels cancer experts point out that study findings were limited to lung cancer and that antioxidants received through food were not implicated.

Cancer Care Tips, Cancer Research

Is Cancer Inevitable? New Research Suggests a More Hopeful Future Part II

Gene and Cell Therapy
Gene and Cell Therapy

When George Johnson, author of The Cancer Chronicles suggested in the New York Times that cancer is inevitable (see our previous post), he echoed a common belief: that as we age our bodies accumulate an increasing number of potentially cancerous mutations that will eventually catch up to us if we live long enough. In other words, if you don’t die of something else, cancer will get you in the end.

That’s a depressingly defeatist attitude that the cancer specialists at Issels cancer treatment centers reject. In more than 60 years of experience treating cancer with integrative immunotherapy, our staff and our patients have found many reasons to be hopeful about the eventual development of a cancer cure. Advanced immunotherapy and targeted cancer therapies have produced some remarkable results in our ongoing battle against cancer.

Cancer mortality rates in the U.S. have been declining slowly but steadily since the War Against Cancer was launched. According to the American Cancer Society’s most recent annual report, the average American’s risk of dying from cancer has decreased 20% over the past two decades. But the fact remains that cancer risk increases with age.

A new study by researchers at the University of Colorado Cancer Center has found that, contrary to current thinking, cancer risk is not increased by years of accumulated mutations, but by tissue changes that occur as we age. As lead researcher James DeGregori, Ph.D., explained to Medical News Today:

“If you look at Mick Jagger in 1960 compared to Mick Jagger today, it’s obvious that his tissue landscape has changed. And it’s this change, not the accumulation of cancer-causing mutations, that drive cancer rates higher as we grow older.”

More on this startling discovery and what it means next time.

Alternative Cancer Treatment, Cancer Care Tips

Cancer Care in Crisis: Are You Getting the Right Treatment?

Get Proper Treatment
Get Proper Treatment

Cancer care has become so complex that many physicians lack “core competencies in caring for patients with cancer,” warns a recent report, Delivering High-Quality Cancer Care: Charting a New Course for a System in Crisis, by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine (IOM). “Patients need to be asking, Is my doctor giving me appropriate treatment?” said cancer specialist Dr. Patricia Ganz of the University of California-Los Angeles. Gantz chaired the medical panel tasked with updating IOM’s 1999 report on the quality of U.S. cancer care. Progress has not been as great as hoped. “Barriers to achieving excellent care for all cancer patients remain daunting,” the new report notes.

Over the next two decades, an expected increase in new cancer diagnoses precipitated by the aging baby boomer generation and a predicted shortage of oncology specialists will make it more difficult to provide cancer patients with adequate care. But the growing complexity of cancer care in an age of genetic discovery is what most concerned the IOM panel.

As scientists continue to explore the genetic mechanisms of cancer tumors and the importance of the tumor microenvironment, highly individualized cancer treatments are expected to become the norm. The IOM panel expressed concern that the volume and speed of new cancer discoveries appears to be outpacing the ability of many physicians to keep up with new knowledge and apply it to patient treatment. That knowledge/treatment gap is only going to widen as cancer treatment moves away from one-size-fits all chemotherapy and radiation treatments and toward modern advanced targeted cancer therapies tailored to meet the specific individual needs of each cancer patient.

Cancer Care Tips, Cancer Research

5 Ways to Cut Your Cancer Risk

Ways to Reduce the Risk of Getting Cancer
Ways to Reduce the Risk of Getting Cancer

“Right now, there’s no sure way to prevent breast cancer, but we know healthy habits significantly decrease your risk,” Debbie Saslow, the American Cancer Society’s director of breast and gynecologic cancer, recently told AARP The Magazine. Studies indicate that what is true of breast cancer can, in many cases, be successfully applied to other cancers with equally beneficial results.

The advent of Big Data has allowed cancer researchers to sift incredible amounts of patient data through highly sophisticated computer sieves. The result has been the discovery of myriad, often previously unknown, behavioral, health, environmental and genetic commonalities among people who develop the same type of cancer. While scientists continue to grapple with the “hows” and “whys,” it is clear that certain health and lifestyle choices can and with alarming statistical frequency do increase the likelihood of cancer development.

While scientists are still working to bring the mechanisms of cancer risk into focus, recent discoveries, backed by decades of experiential data, strongly indicate that five specific health habits have the potential to significantly decrease cancer risk. Interestingly, all are general health habits that support and strengthen the body’s immune system. Individualized immunotherapy, considered by many researchers to be cancer’s kryptonite, is ushering in what is being heralded as a new age in cancer treatment that is increasing medical focus on risk avoidance and cancer prevention.

5 Ways to Decrease Your Cancer Risk

1. Get at least 6 hours of sleep a night.

2. Lose weight.

3. Eat more vegetables.

4. Drink less alcohol.

5. Get more exercise.

Follow Issels, the alternative cancer treatment center, on social media for how-to tips on decreasing your cancer risk.