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Despite its life-saving qualities, chemotherapy has long had a nasty reputation, known as a necessary poison for people suffering from cancer. But in some cases, chemotherapy is so damaging that it may even backfire and make the cancer worse, a new study has found. The study, published in Nature Medicine, found that chemotherapy causes damage to healthy cells, which triggers them secrete a protein that actually sustains tumor growth, Cancer UK reported.

Chemotherapy can undermine itself by causing a rogue response in healthy cells, which could explain why people become resistant, a study suggests. The treatment loses effectiveness for a significant number of patients with secondary cancers. Writing in Nature Medicine, US experts said chemo causes wound-healing cells around tumours to make a protein that helps the cancer resist treatment. A UK expert said the next step would be to find a way to block this effect. Around 90% of patients with solid cancers, such as breast, prostate, lung and colon, that spread - metastatic disease - develop resistance to chemotherapy. Treatment...

Cancer-busting chemotherapy can cause damage to healthy cells which triggers them to secrete a protein that sustains tumour growth and resistance to further treatment, a study said Sunday. Researchers in the United States made the "completely unexpected" finding while seeking to explain why cancer cells are so resilient inside the human body when they are easy to kill in the lab. They tested the effects of a type of chemotherapy on tissue collected from men with prostate cancer, and found "evidence of DNA damage" in healthy cells after treatment, the scientists wrote in Nature Medicine. http://ca.news.yahoo.com/chemotherapy-backfire-boost-cancer-growth-study-164516832.html

Doctors have successfully dropped the first "smart bomb" on breast cancer, using a drug to deliver a toxic payload to tumor cells while leaving healthy ones alone. In a key test involving nearly 1,000 women with very advanced disease, the experimental treatment extended by several months the time women lived without their cancer getting worse, doctors planned to report Sunday at a cancer conference in Chicago. More importantly, the treatment seems likely to improve survival; it will take more time to know for sure. After two years, 65 percent of women who received it were still alive versus 47 percent...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - In a move that threatens to further inflame concerns about the rationing of medical care, the nation's leading association of cancer physicians issued a list on Wednesday of five common tests and treatments that doctors should stop offering to cancer patients. The list emerged from a two-year effort, similar to a project other medical specialties are undertaking, to identify procedures that do not help patients live longer or better or that may even be harmful, yet are routinely prescribed

In what is being seen as a preview of a fully implemented Obamacare, government officials in Michigan are demanding that a 9-year-old child follow standard procedure and take a dangerous course of cancer medications that can cause additional cancer – even though the boy has had three scans indicating an absence of the disease. The case is being fought on behalf of Ken and Erin Stieler and their son Jacob by attorneys with the Home School Legal Defense Association. The organization concerns itself with home school rights, responsibilities and restrictions but also intercedes in cases that could have a significant...

Silver can kill some cancers as effectively as chemotherapy with potentially fewer side effects, new research claims. Scientists say that old wives tales about the precious metal being a ‘silver bullet’ to beat the Big C could be true. The metal already has a wide range of medicinal uses and is a common antiseptic, antibiotic and means of purifying water in the third world. And British researchers now say that silver compounds are as effective at killing certain cancer cells as a leading chemotherapy drug, but with potentially far fewer side-effects. They compared it to Cisplatin, currently used to treat...

Hugo Chavez said here Sunday that he felt well after the second phase of chemotherapy for his cancer. "My examinations went very well and everything will end well,"... not sure whether he needs a third phase. Chavez returned from Havana Saturday after this round of chemotherapy...

Enlarge Image Gem of a therapy? Clusters of nanodiamonds bearing chemotherapy drugs attack cancer cells. Credit: Science/AAAS If you give a nanodiamond to your fiancée, you can forget about the wedding. But a new study reports that these tiny flecks of carbon can shrink tumors in mice by delivering chemotherapy drugs to cancer cells. Lead author Dean Ho, a biomedical engineer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, says that one of the major challenges in chemotherapy is when tumor cells develop mechanisms to pump drugs right back out. But Ho reasoned that when the drug is bound to a...

If you know any woman currently undergoing chemotherapy, please pass tdhe word to her that there is a cleaning service that provides FREE housecleaning - once per month for 4 months while she is in treatment. All she has to do is sign up and have her doctor fax a note confirming the treatment. Cleaning for a Reason will have a participating maid service in her zip code area arrange for the service. This organization serves the entire USA and currently has 547 partners to help these women. It's our job to pass the word and let them know that...

STEM cell researchers have found a way to turn a person's skin into blood, a process that could be used to treat cancer and other ailments, according to a Canadian study published today. The method uses cells from a patch of a person's skin and transforms it into blood that is a genetic match, without using human embryonic stem cells, said the study in the journal Nature. By avoiding the controversial and more complicated processes involved with using human embryonic stem cells to create blood, this approach simplifies the process, researchers said. "What we believe we can do in the...

An ancient Chinese medicine might ease side effects of cancer treatments. An age-old mixture of four herbs could spare patients with cancer some of the side effects of chemotherapy. The cocktail comprises Chinese peonies, Chinese liquorice, the fruit of the Chinese date tree and flowers of the Chinese skullcap plant. In China, they call it 'Huang Qin Tang' and have used it to treat gastrointestinal problems for about 1,800 years. A start-up pharmaceutical company called PhytoCeutica has dubbed its proprietary pill of the blend 'PHY906', and shown in early clinical trials that the mix can combat the severe diarrhoea caused...

Health Care: There might not be a "death panel," as Sarah Palin described it, but federal bureaucrats will be making end-of-life decisions. That's why state-run medicine is a leading cause of death in Britain and Canada.A post on the former Alaska governor's Facebook page has caused a stir by discussing openly what many privately fear and something we have written about. End-of-life counseling and efforts to measure cost-effectiveness of treatment will combine in a perfect storm to ration care in a way that lets the government decide who lives and who dies. "The America I know and love is not...

We knew it would come to this when Oregon insisted on passing its assisted-suicide laws. It doesn’t take much for assisted suicide to go from a humane option to a cost-saving device, especially when the state pays for the medical care. One patient in Oregon got a letter that made this all too clear, when in the same letter rejecting her request for life-extending chemotherapy, Oregon offered her “physician-aid-in-dying”. In other words, Oregon offered their customer a heapin’ helping of death: http://www.katu.com/news/26119539.html The doctor interviewed by the news station seems offended at the suggestion that Oregon would decide to save...

Tuesday March 17, 2009 Courageous Mother Delays Chemotherapy Treatment for Cancer, Saves Lives of Twins By Hilary WhiteLIVERPOOL, March 17, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - While some doctors routinely offer abortion in the case of women who are pregnant and facing cancer treatments, one British housewife has demonstrated that it is not always necessary to make such a difficult situation into a death sentence for the unborn child. Rachel Crossland, a British housewife and mother of six who had been diagnosed with cancer, refused chemotherapy and radiation treatment when she was informed she was 13 weeks pregnant with twins. The Daily...

AP MEDICAL WRITER SAN ANTONIO -- Thousands of breast cancer patients each year could be spared chemotherapy or get gentler versions of it without harming their odds of beating the disease, new research suggests. One study found that certain women did better - were less likely to die or have a relapse - if given a less harsh drug than Adriamycin, a mainstay of treatment for decades. Another study found that a gene test can help predict whether some women need chemo at all - even among those whose cancer has spread to their lymph nodes, which typically brings full...

Australian Doctor Dies After Refusing Cancer Treatment in Order to Save Her Unborn Child Refused high-level chemotherapy that might have saved her from Hodgkin's lymphoma By Hilary White MELBOURNE, September 14, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Another woman has saved her unborn child's life at the expense of her own. In a case similar in many ways to that of Gianna Beretta Molla, the Italian doctor recently canonized by the Vatican for a similar act of self-sacrifice, an Australian GP, Dr. Ellice Hammond, 37, refused high-level chemotherapy that might have saved her from Hodgkin's lymphoma. The treatment would have endangered the life...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Only a fraction of patients with hard-to-treat lymphoma ever try two breakthrough "smart-bomb" drugs that bring radiation straight to cancerous cells - with just two shots a week apart, not the usual months of care. The marketing failure has a manufacturer trying to sell off one of the drugs, and increasingly frustrated specialists worry it will jeopardize attempts to expand this promising new field to fight other cancers, too. [SNIP] The issue: Despite research showing they work well, fewer than 10 percent of lymphoma patients who are candidates for Zevalin and Bexxar ever use them, says Dr....

Stem cells and metastatic cancer: fatal attraction? It is widely hoped that neural stem cells will eventually be useful for replacing nerves damaged by degenerative diseases like Alzheimer disease and multiple sclerosis. But there may also be another use for such stem cells--delivering anti-cancer drugs to cancer cells. A Perspective article in PLoS Medic ine, by Professor Riccardo Fodde (Erasmus Medical Center, The Netherlands), discusses a new study in mice, published in the launch issue of PLoS ONE (www.plosone.org), that showed that neural stem cells could be used to help deliver anti-cancer drugs to metastatic cancer cells. One of the...

DUARTE, Calif. -- Patients with advanced cancer that has spread to many different sites often do not have many treatment options, since they would be unable to tolerate the doses of treatment they would need to kill the tumors.  Researchers at City of Hope and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital may have found a way to treat cancers that have spread throughout the body more effectively. They used modified neural stem cells to activate and concentrate chemotherapeutic drugs predominately at tumor sites, so that normal tissue surrounding the tumor and throughout the body remain relatively unharmed."This approach could significantly improve...

A gene test that predicts which cancer drugs will be most effective for different people is to be trialled in the US. Preliminary results suggest the test, which looks at the unique molecular traits of a tumour, predicts the best drug with 80% accuracy.The first clinical trial is planned in 120 breast cancer patients next year. If the results are good, the test could be applied to all chemotherapy-treated cancers, Nature Medicine reports.The researchers at Duke University, North Carolina, say the test has the potential to revolutionise cancer care by identifying the right drug for each individual patient. Lead researcher...

Close window Published online: 6 September 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060904-8 Tuning the body's defence to cancerTurning off our natural killer could help to reduce chemotherapy side effects.Lucy Heady Surprise: the guardian of the genome works differently than thought, according to tests in mice.Punchstock A fundamental shift in our understanding of the body's natural defence mechanism against cancer has revealed an odd trick: turning this weapon off during chemotherapy might actively help to reduce side effects such as hair loss. Our cells contain a protein called p53, dubbed 'the guardian of the genome', which regulates the process of DNA replication. It...

Should the government intervene to save the life of a 16-year-old boy, even if it means forcing him into medical care against his and his parents' wishes? This is the question at stake in the case of Starchild Abraham Cherrix, a teenage boy who has Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the lymph nodes that is highly treatable if diagnosed early. After completing chemotherapy, Abraham learned earlier this year that the cancer had returned. The boy decided to forgo further chemotherapy (the first round had left him severely nauseated and so weak that he could barely walk at times) and...

Nicotine can prevent chemotherapy drugs such as taxol from killing lung cancer cells, research say, in a finding that may help explain why lung cancer is so difficult to treat in smokers. The findings may also suggest even people who quit smoking but use nicotine supplements, such as patches or gum, may not be helped as much as they should be by cancer therapy, US researchers said. "Our findings are in agreement with clinical studies showing that patients who continue to smoke have worse survival profiles than those who quit before treatment," the researchers wrote in a study published by...

MATTHEWS, N.C. -- Two twin girls were stabbed to death Friday at their home on Creek Pointe Drive, police said. The father of the 5-year-olds, David Lauren Crespi, [has been charged with murdering them. Medic reported that Crespi, 45, called 911 at 12:45 p.m., saying he fatally stabbed his daughters. He also threatened to kill himself, Medic said. When police arrived at the scene, Crespi was waiting for them outside the home. The children were inside, and there was nothing paramedics could do to save them. Officials couldn’t come up with an immediate explanation. “We’re not anywhere where we can...

AP MEDICAL WRITER SAN ANTONIO -- For years, doctors have known exactly what to do with breast cancer patients like Eva Ossorio: Poison them. Blasting women with toxic chemicals was considered the best way to save their lives. The bigger the cancer or the more it had spread, the more vile liquid doctors pumped into their veins to try to kill it. But there's been a sea change in the last year. Guidelines recently adopted in Europe and similar ones unveiled this weekend at a conference in Texas will result in far fewer women getting chemotherapy in the future. The...

Cancer Patients Urged to Avoid Antioxidants During Chemotherapy The newest medical advice from a growing number of cancer researchers is to avoid antioxidants such as Vitamins C and E, Selenium, Coenzyme Q10, and Glutathione or Glutathione Precursor (aka "NAC or N-Acetyl-L-Cysteine") during chemotherapy or radiation therapy. Studies suggest that there is "theoretical harm" that antioxidants interfere with the effectiveness of chemotherapy and actually may help tumors to resist the chemotherapy treatment. These precautions would not necessarily apply to non-antioxidant supplements or use of antioxidants for prevention. Below are web links to copyrighted articles, one urging precaution, two urging not to...

A nanocell that can burrow into a tumour, cut off its blood supply and detonate a lethal dose of anti-cancer toxins has been developed.The double-action therapy, which comes packed in a tiny double chamber, leaves healthy cells unscathed. It has proved safe and effective against melanoma and a form of lung cancer in mice. Details of the technique, developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are published in Nature. The technique combines two methods of combating cancer - poisoning tumour cells and cutting off the blood supply to the tumour. Previously, the dual strategy has proved difficult as chemotherapy could...

After her second round of chemo, Laura bowed to the inevitable and got a buzz cut and a wig named Wanda. It's typical that the hair loss kicks in about 2 weeks after the first treatment. I know because I had my sixth chemo yesterday. I'm so jealous that she still is so beautiful without much hair! I'm 48 and reasonably attractive but me without hair is not something anyone would want to see, believe me :-)

...FDA oncology drugs chief Richard Pazdur is the most important person in the U.S. government when it comes to cancer drugs, and he has never made a secret that he dislikes the accelerated approval process under which Iressa got the green light. Nor has he been shy about suggesting that the agency was railroaded in this drug's case. The truth is that Iressa-maker AstraZeneca simply refused to play by Dr. Pazdur's rules. In 2002 -- knowing it had plenty of data to qualify for accelerated approval -- the company rebuffed his requests for more trials and appealed directly to something...

Just checked Laura's website. She said that the first round of chemo has gone well, and that she would be back on the radio Monday. Dan Patrick from Texas is filling in for her today. Laura, we love you and continue our prayers for your strength, courage, and conquest of this cancer. Godspeed and blessings to you.

Laura Ingraham, calling in to the Curtis & Kuby show this morning, said she would begin four rounds of chemotherapy starting in late June.She said although the cancer had not spread to her lymph nodes, tests had shown that she has a genetic predisposition to having the cancer spread; hence her decision to go ahead with chemotherapy to make that less likely to happen.She also said this is a hormone-sensitive cancer (which she said was good news); but apparently she has decided to forgo hormone therapy (?) in favor of the chemo. (I'm not clear on this; someone please correct...

Adult cancer patients are taking breast milk in an attempt to to boost their immune systems and reduce the side effects of chemotherapy. A milk bank in California has quietly supplied 28 adult patients in the past four years with donated breast milk. The Mothers' Milk Bank, one of six in the United States, distributes the milk mainly to premature and low-birth-weight babies but also gives it to adults with a doctor's prescription. Cancer specialists in Britain and America were sceptical about the treatment last night, saying that there was little or no hard evidence that it worked. Some of...

Results May Let Some Skip Chemotherapy A new genetic test can identify breast cancer patients who are unlikely to suffer recurrences, potentially sparing tens of thousands of women from unnecessarily undergoing chemotherapy, researchers reported yesterday. The test appears to offer a solution to one of the most vexing problems in breast cancer treatment today -- deciding which women can safely forgo the expensive and often debilitating follow-up treatment -- and marks one of the first tangible benefits of the massive effort to harness genetics to fight cancer, experts said. "These study findings represent a major advance in our understanding of...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist's health is shrouded in mystery, the extent of his thyroid cancer a closely guarded secret. Several coming events could give the public an idea about the seriousness of his condition.Since announcing his illness in a statement on Oct. 25, the 80-year-old Rehnquist has run the nation's highest court from his home in suburban Virginia.He rules on cases by reviewing transcripts of arguments and passing along his votes to justices. Opinions are largely researched and drafted by law clerks. Administrative tasks fall to a top aide.The only update on his condition came in...

A marijuana-based medication for people suffering from multiple sclerosis and severe pain is expected to be approved for sale in Britain early this year, British officials say. The drug, Sativex, developed by GW Pharmaceuticals, a British company, is a liquid extract from marijuana grown by the company under license from the government. Developed to be sprayed under the tongue, it would be the first drug in recent decades to include all the components of the cannabis plant, advocates of medical marijuana say. The British agency that regulates pharmaceuticals does not like to discuss potential drugs before they are approved. The...