Cancer

About 36% of East Asians (Japanese, Koreans and Chinese) have an enzyme deficiency that causes their skin to redden, or flush, when they drink alcohol. Heavy alcohol consumption significantly raises the risk for esophageal cancer among such individuals, say scientists at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and Japan's Kurihama Alcohol Center. A paper⁽¹⁾ on the topic is in the March 24, 2009 issue of PLoS Medicine.

It is a sad reality that where there is a buck to be made, scam artists are not long in coming. How much sadder is it, however, when terminally ill ovarian cancer sufferers are subjected to claims and promises of healing, remission, and miracle cures that have no basis in fact.

Targeting the terminally ill, but also those who might have just realized they are suffering from ovarian cancer, these alleged miracle cures assert that they use methods that are much safer and easier to deal with than the traditional surgery, chemotherapy and also radiation therapy.

Seeking to cash in on the desperation of women in childbearing years who find it hard to reconcile the need for a complete hysterectomy with the unfulfilled wish to have children of their own, these medical scammers will try to sell nutritional supplements, useless gadgets, and other devices that are supposed to make the cancerous cells disappear.

After surgery, chemotherapy is the most commonly used method of therapy for those diagnosed with ovarian cancer. When your physician decides it is time to begin fighting ovarian cancer with chemotherapy, the odds are good that you will have a lot of questions. First and foremost, of course, is the question as to exactly what chemotherapy will do for you and what it will do to the cancer.

Chemotherapy is a treatment option that relies on prescription drugs which only have one goal: the destruction of cancerous cells. When the chemicals are introduced into the cancer affected tissues, they will gradually slow down the spread of the cells and also the growth of the cells.

Women who have ovarian cancer and have had surgery and chemotherapy as treatment and who develop recurrent cancer may be placed into one of three different groups referred to as A, B, C.

Patients that are placed in group an are resistant to primary therapy and have tumor growth during treatment. Treatment suggested is non-cross resistant chemotherapies or biological therapies.

Patients that are placed in-group B are those who have responded well to the initial chemotherapy, but developed recurrent cancer within months of the primary treatment.

Patients that are placed in-group C are those who showed good response to the initial chemotherapy but then developed recurrent cancer for more than 6 months after the end of their initial treatment.

Medical researchers at Penn State University have developed a nontoxic nanoparticle they say is an all-around effective delivery system for both therapeutic drugs and the fluorescent dyes that can track their delivery. The calcium phosphate particles, ranging in size from 20 to 50 nanometers, have been shown to successfully enter cells and dissolve harmlessly, releasing their cargo of drugs or dye.