Free Republic

Have no doubt about it: Film critic Roger Ebert is no fan of Rush Limbaugh. The unabashed liberal reeled off a series of one-liners on Twitter against the radio talk show host over the weekend, in the wake of Limbaugh's hospital visit due to chest pains. A sampling: "Rush: Hawaii is the only country where the Hawaiian shirts come in S, M, L, XL, Rush, and Sumo." "Rush: Nurse at snack time: 'You have nuts?' 'No!' 'You have dates?' 'Hey, if I had nuts, I'd have dates!' Ah...Har! Har! Har!" "Rush: Stuck in this hospital room watching TV, I really...

By Richard Knox In his full-bore battle against brain cancer, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy resorted to treatment many consider experimental -- proton beam radiation therapy. Sen. Kennedy returns to Senate last year after treatment for brain cancer. Medicare pays for it. But his death leaves open a slew of questions about the costly treatment, which delivers high doses of radiation to tumor cells while largely sparing healthy tissue from damage. Did it do him any good? Should Medicare (or private insurers) pay for the unproven treatment? And most politically fraught, should Kennedy's legacy issue -- universal health care -- include...

Why do the British lag behind American survival rates? Screening standards are different. In the United States, internists recommend that men 50 and older get screened for colon cancer; in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, screening begins at 75. And British patients wait much longer to see specialists. A Clinical Oncology study of British lung cancer treatment found in 2000 that 20% "of potentially curable patients became incurable on the waiting list." Novel drugs offered here often aren't available there; for instance, Avastin, a drug for advanced colon cancer, is prescribed more often in the U.S. than...

Kennedy is making a final press for universal healthcare, from his sickbed As Congress wrestles with legislation to give Americans access to quality care, which the Democrat worked toward for 46 years, the senator is sidelined with brain cancer, but not out of the game. Faye Fiore and Noam N. Levey July 25, 2009 Reporting from Washington -- Ted Kennedy wakes up mornings in his house on Cape Cod to a packet of news clippings put together by his wife. If there's a hearing going on in Washington, he watches on his computer. Five hundred miles away, Congress is wrestling...

An "electronic nose" developed by NASA scientists to monitor air quality on the Space Shuttle Endeavor may also be used to detect the difference between normal and cancerous brain cells. Neurosurgeons with the City of Hope Cancer Center and scientific researchers from the Brain Mapping Foundation and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both in California, used the device to investigate the role of cellular odors in cellular trafficking, brain cancer metastasis, stem cell migration, and the potential of the device for use in brain imaging, according to a press release. The device, which will be installed in the International Space Station,...

Enlarge ImageTelling tumor. A genetic mutation could help doctors diagnose deadly tumors in the brain.Credit: Photograph courtesy of Duke Photopath While survival rates for many cancers have improved over the years, brain cancers often remain stubbornly unresponsive to treatment. Now, researchers are turning to genetics and have hit on a gene mutation that can be used to differentiate between the deadliest brain cancers. The find could help doctors more accurately diagnose these devastating tumors. The most common brain tumor, glioblastoma, is also the deadliest. These tumors occur in two forms: primary, in which patients suddenly develop large and highly...

<p>Can we please have a civilized thread offering our prayers for Sen. Kennedy and his family? He has just been diagnosed with brain cancer (glioma) which has a very poor prognosis. The moderators have already been forced to pull at least FOUR threads on this topic due to uncivilized posters. If you feel the urge to post something unkind, don't.</p>

A highly targeted treatment that relies on the patient's own stem cells improves outcomes for children with brain tumors called medulloblastomas, U.S. researchers report. Children with high-risk medulloblastoma have a 30 percent to 40 percent chance of surviving to five years, and chemotherapy usually lasts for about 12 months. However, "not only can we now cure about 70 percent of children with high-risk medulloblastoma, we can also cure more than 80 percent of those with standard-risk disease with a shorter, and therefore more convenient, chemotherapy approach," lead researcher Dr. Amar Gajjar, from St Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, said...

THURSDAY, July 20 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers say they're gaining greater insight into how the brain's own stem cells may trigger one of the deadliest forms of cancer. The stem cells -- which can turn into a variety of brain cells -- appear to carry a receptor that pulls in a specific chemical. If the cells get over-stimulated by the chemical, that may lead to tumor formation. The discovery, "might lead to better understanding of early growth" of brain malignancies, said study co-author Arturo Alvarez-Buylla, a professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. As a result,...

Scientists have identified a new molecule that inhibits proliferation of a broad range of lethal malignant glioma cells in vitro and in vivo. The findings, published in the May issue of Cancer Cell, shed light on which PI3 kinase family members are most likely to play a role in cancer progression. This study reinforces the concept that successful small molecule kinase inhibitors must display a broad reactivity to effectively attenuate the complex signaling pathways involved in malignant transformation and to thwart to the ability of cancer cells to adapt to stress. Lipid kinases belonging to the PI3 kinase family, made...

Attaching a recently discovered cytokine to neural stem cells derived from bone marrow, researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center's Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute have developed a tool to track and kill malignant brain tumor cells and provide long-term protection against their return. Results of an animal study are published in the March 1, 2006 issue of Cancer Research, and the researchers are now applying to regulatory agencies to translate their work into human clinical trials. Gliomas are highly invasive tumors with poorly defined borders that intermingle with healthy brain tissue, making complete surgical removal nearly impossible. Furthermore, cells separate from the...

Do devices such as cell or mobile phones, that emit radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RFEMF), cause cancer? According to the American Cancer Society (ACS), this is just another widespread "cancer myth" that is befuddling the minds of the American public. A recent ACS "cancer literacy" poll found that 30 percent of the general public agrees with the proposition that electronic devices, like cell phones, can cause cancer in people who use them.  Ted Gansler, MD, MBA, Director of Medical Content, American Cancer Society, blames the persistence of this belief on litigious lawyers and the sensationalist media. "Alarming front-page coverage," he says,...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Singer Lou Rawls is dead. A spokesman says he died this morning at a Los Angeles hospital. He sold more than 40 million albums, and his hits included "You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine."

As mobile communications and media devices proliferate, the nagging worry frequently goes unchallenged: Gadgets like iPods, cell phones and laptops produce an increasingly disconnected public sphere. This is a familiar critique -- last year, a fellow student expressed in the campus newspaper a similar dissatisfaction with the popularity of MP3 players. He argued that, lost in our private worlds of music, we fail to reach out and connect with one another. Certainly, I wonder about the social impact of new technology -- particularly, the contra...

As one who has greatly benefitted from the prayers of many a Freeper, I come to you today to ask for prayers for a dear colleague of mine. His name is Colin and I am proud to call him friend. Colin was diagnosed today with brain cancer. Colin and I started our work together in February, 2003 in less than optimal circumstances. In short, he and I were thrown together into a maelstrom of frantic and unending work (upwards of 20 hours a day) immediately following the loss of shuttle Columbia. It was in those days that he and I...

A star he is ~ but it could have been different. Lance Armstrong could have well been an abortion statistic. His mother was a 16 year old unwed mom and poor. But she did the right thing and was a continual source of support and inspiration to Lance throughout his life. Linda, then a supermarket checkout girl, had got pregnant at the age of 16 and gave birth to her son when she was only 17. The pair enjoy an exceptionally close relationship, which Linda puts down to the fact that "we grew up together". Armstrong took on the...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Gulf War veterans exposed to chemical munitions at Khamisiyah, Iraq are nearly twice as likely as their unexposed peers from the same war to die from brain cancer, according to a report in the American Journal of Public Health. "We found an approximately twofold excess of brain cancer deaths, 12 to 13 excess deaths in a population of 100,000 veterans, associated with possible exposure to chemical warfare agents," Tim A. Bullman, from the Department of Veteran Affairs in Washington, DC, and colleagues report. In the new study, rates of death from specific causes for 100,487...

Cells primed to carry relief to brain tumors By JOHN FAUBERof the Journal Sentinel staff Last Updated: April 4, 2002 Bethesda, Md. - Scientists at the National Institutes of Health for the first time have engineered a type of immature human brain cell to carry potent anti-cancer substances directly to malignant brain tumors in animals.The potential therapy represents a promising new avenue for dealing with one of the most intractable problems in medicine - effectively seeking out and killing tumors in the human brain. Far from being a cure, the technique so far has been used only in mice that...