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Showing posts with the label metastasize

New Breast Cancer Test May Help Doctors Guess Better About Potential Spread

I wish I was around for this, or at least, my cancer was, before I was (in my opinion) over-treated.    But a new test can allegedly tell if a breast cancer is going to spread.  Nix the chemo, radiation, and surgery, if not needed. (Doctors can't always tell, so they treat, "just in case.") Almost 40,000 women a year die of breast cancer, and many thousands more are diagnosed with it. According to newswise.com, currently marketed tests assess risk for breast cancer metastasis by looking for changes in gene expression or in levels of proteins associated with growth of tumor cells,”  “But those changes don’t reflect the mechanism by which individual tumor cells invade blood vessels, a necessary step for metastasis," said Joan Jones, M.D. , senior author of the JNCI paper, professor of pathology , of anatomy and structural biology and of epidemiology & population health at Einstein and attending pathologist at Montefiore Medical Center . "By contra...

Gain Weight During Chemo? May Make Your Cancer Grow

We've been told over and over how much being overweight or obese can affect our health. But what if it were to affect your treatment of cancer? A new study has found that calorie restriction, a kind of dieting in which food intake is decreased by a certain percentage, may improve outcomes for women in breast cancer. "According to a study published May 26th in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment , the triple negative subtype of breast cancer – one of the most aggressive forms – is less likely to spread, or metastasize, to new sites in the body when mice were fed a restricted diet," newswise.com reports. The Web site notes that when mouse models of triple negative cancer were fed 30 percent less than what they ate when given free access to food, the cancer cells decreased their production of RNA molecules that inhibit tumor growth. Researchers have found that these molecules, or genes, often increased in triple negative cancers that metastasize.  Breast can...