Women treated for the cancer Hodgkin lymphoma will be able to better understand their risks of future infertility after researchers estimated their risk of premature menopause with different treatments.

The findings, set out in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, are based on the experience of more than 2,000 young women in England and Wales treated for the cancer over a period of more than 40 years.

Previous research has suggested that women with Hodgkin lymphoma who receive certain types of chemotherapy or radiotherapy are at increased risk of going through the menopause early – but there was insufficient information to provide patients with detailed advice.

But the new study, led by scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, provides precise estimates of risk for women depending on which treatment types and doses they received and at what age - allowing doctors to give them detailed advice about their risks of future infertility.

The research was largely funded by Breakthrough Breast Cancer and involved researchers from across the UK at more than 50 universities and hospitals. The research team followed-up 2,127 women who had been treated for Hodgkin lymphoma in England and Wales between 1960 and 2004, and who had been aged under 36 at the time. All had received treatment with chest radiotherapy, sometimes alongside other treatments.

Some 605 of the women in the study underwent non-surgical menopause before the age of 40. This was a large enough number for the researchers to estimate accurate risks of menopause at different ages, depending on the mixture and doses of treatments they received and the age they received them.

Patients with advanced laryngeal cancer appear to have better survival if they are treated with surgery than nonsurgical chemoradiation.

Approximately 11,000 to 13,000 cases of laryngeal cancer are diagnosed each year and squamous cell carcinoma accounts for the vast majority of these tumors. Prior to 1991, total surgical removal of the larynx with postoperative radiation was the standard of care for advanced cancer. Since then, chemoradiation has become increasingly popular treatment because it can preserve the larynx.

The authors evaluated survival outcomes for surgical vs. nonsurgical treatment for advanced laryngeal cancer. The authors used data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database for their study of 5,394 patients diagnosed with stage III or IV laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma between 1992 and 2009.

Patients who had surgery had better 2-year and 5-year disease-specific survival (70 percent vs. 64 percent and 55 percent vs. 51 percent, respectively) and 2-year and 5-year overall survival (64 percent vs. 57 percent and 44 percent vs. 39 percent, respectively) than patients who did not under surgery. The use of nonsurgical treatment increased over time: 32 percent in the 1992 to 1997 patient group, 45 percent in the 1998 to 2003 group and 62 percent in the 2004 to 2009 group. The gap in survival between the two groups consistently narrowed over subsequent years. Patients who were diagnosed between 2004 and 2009 had better survival than those diagnosed earlier and this may be due to improvements in radiation and chemotherapy strategies.

The authors state that patients need to be made aware of the modest but significant survival disadvantage associated with nonsurgical therapy as part of the shared decision-making process during treatment selection.

Megwalu UC and Sikora AG (2014). Survival Outcomes in Advanced Laryngeal Cancer. JAMA Otolaryngol. Head Neck Surg., EPub Ahead of Print [Abstract]

Being diagnosed with breast cancer is a life-changing experience. It can be hard to handle the news at first, and even harder to know how to proceed, no matter your prognosis.

While everyone’s journey is unique, knowing that others before you have been through something similar can give you the strength and inspiration you need to keep everything in perspective.

Click through slideshow for the type of wisdom gained from great personal struggle, and know that you’re not alone.

Written by Rachael Maier

- See more at: http://www.healthline.com/health/breast-cancer/quotes#sthash.BUA5itc4.dpuf

New findings published today in the journal Cancer Research reveal that some postmenopausal overweight breast cancer patients who use common anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin or ibuprofen have significantly lower breast cancer recurrence rates.

Researchers from the Cancer Therapy & Research Center at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the University of Texas at Austin began by examining blood serum from CTRC breast cancer patients, said CTRC oncologist Andrew Brenner, M.D., Ph.D.

They placed the serum in a culture of fat cells that make estrogen, and then placed the serum on breast cancer cells. The serum from overweight and obese patients caused the cancer cells to grow much more aggressively than the serum from patients who were not overweight.

"It looks like the mechanism is prostaglandins, which have a role in inflammation, and there's more of it in the obese patient serum," Dr. Brenner said.

Based on those findings, the researchers did a retrospective study on patients from the CTRC and the START Center for Cancer Care. They were segregated into those taking COX2 inhibitors (aspirin or ibuprofen) and those who did not.

"Patients who were on COX2 inhibitors tended to have a lower recurrence rate," Dr. Brenner said.

Anti-inflammatory use reduced the recurrence rate of ERα positive breast cancer by 50 percent and extended patients' disease-free period by more than two years. ER positive breast cancers, cancers that grow in response to exposure to the hormone estrogen, are among the most common form of the disease, accounting for approximately 75 percent of diagnoses.

Cancer researcher Linda deGraffenried, Ph.D., from The University of Texas at Austin, designed the study, working closely with Dr. Brenner and Murali Beeram, M.D., a cancer specialist from the START Center.

A modified version of the Clostridium novyi (C. noyvi-NT) bacterium can produce a strong and precisely targeted anti-tumor response in rats, dogs and now humans, according to a new report from Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center researchers.

In its natural form, C. novyi is found in the soil and, in certain cases, can cause tissue-damaging infection in cattle, sheep and humans. The microbe thrives only in oxygen-poor environments, which makes it a targeted means of destroying oxygen-starved cells in tumors that are difficult to treat with chemotherapy and radiation. The Johns Hopkins team removed one of the bacteria's toxin-producing genes to make it safer for therapeutic use.

This is a gram stain of C. novyi-NT germination in a dog tumor. The darker rod-shaped bacteria are visible throughout the image. Credit: David L. Huso and Baktiar Karim of the Johns Hopkins Department of Pathology

For the study, the researchers tested direct-tumor injection of the C. noyvi-NT spores in 16 pet dogs that were being treated for naturally occurring tumors. Six of the dogs had an anti-tumor response 21 days after their first treatment. Three of the six showed complete eradication of their tumors, and the length of the longest diameter of the tumor shrunk by at least 30 percent in the three other dogs.

Most of the dogs experienced side effects typical of a bacterial infection, such as fever and tumor abscesses and inflammation, according to a report on the work published online Aug. 13 in Science Translational Medicine.

In a Phase I clinical trial of C. noyvi-NT spores conducted at MD Anderson Cancer Center, a patient with an advanced soft tissue tumor in the abdomen received the spore injection directly into a metastatic tumor in her arm. The treatment significantly reduced the tumor in and around the bone. "She had a very vigorous inflammatory response and abscess formation," according to Nicholas Roberts, Vet.M.B., Ph.D. "But at the moment, we haven't treated enough people to be sure if the spectrum of responses that we see in dogs will truly recapitulate what we see in people."

"One advantage of using bacteria to treat cancer is that you can modify these bacteria relatively easily, to equip them with other therapeutic agents, or make them less toxic as we have done here, " said Shibin Zhou, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of oncology at the Cancer Center. Zhou is also the director of experimental therapeutics at the Kimmel Cancer Center's Ludwig Center for Cancer Genetics and Therapeutics. He and colleagues at Johns Hopkins began exploring C. novyi's cancer-fighting potential more than a decade ago after studying hundred-year old accounts of an early immunotherapy called Coley toxins, which grew out of the observation that some cancer patients who contracted serious bacterial infections showed cancer remission.

New research shows that girls with cancer who are most likely to become infertile after treatment can be identified using guidelines developed almost 20 years ago. 

The criteria – developed in Edinburgh – will help to select which girls should be offered the opportunity to freeze some tissue from their ovaries for use in the future. Doctors are optimistic that the frozen tissue could one day help young cancer survivors to have children of their own.

Some cancer treatments can affect female fertility by bringing on early menopause. Freezing samples of ovary tissue before patients start treatment is the only option to try to preserve their fertility.At least 30 babies have been born from frozen ovarian tissue taken from adult women but the procedure remains unproven in girls and young women.

Taking the initial samples of ovaries to be frozen involves a surgical technique and is still relatively experimental. It is therefore crucial that doctors can accurately predict which patients are most likely to benefit and when it can be safely performed. Guidelines were developed almost 20 years ago to select which girls should be offered the procedure, based on their age, type of cancer treatment and their chances of being cured of their cancer. Now that the girls are older, doctors are able to validate their predictions.

Long-term survival from pancreatic cancer has failed to improve in 40 years – with the outlook remaining the lowest of the 21 most common cancers, according to new figures published by Cancer Research UK. Today just over three per cent of pancreatic cancer patients survive for at least five years, only a fraction more than the two per cent who survived that long in the early 1970s.

Across all cancers, half of patients now survive at least twice that long. But most cases of pancreatic cancer go undetected until it is too late for surgery. And with the lack of effective tests and treatments for the disease, the majority of patients still die within a year.

But Cancer Research UK is planning to more than double its £6 million annual research spend on pancreas cancer within five years, making inroads into an area of research that until now has been globally neglected. The disease is now under the spotlight across the charity's five institutes nationwide.

Professor Andrew Biankin is among the three quarters of scientists at Cancer Research UK's Beatson Institute at the University of Glasgow who are contributing to pancreatic cancer research.

He said: "Pancreatic cancer has very few symptoms at first and I see far too many patients who, out of the blue, are told they may have just months or even weeks to live. We've been waiting too long for new drugs to treat the disease and there are very few options available for people with advanced forms of the disease. It's a situation that simply has to change and we can only do that by funding more high quality research and trials, to get treatments out of the lab and into patients as soon as possible."

Asian-American breast cancer survivors are focused in the study

Writing down fears, emotions and the benefits of a cancer diagnosis may improve health outcomes for Asian-American breast cancer survivors, according to a study conducted by a researcher at the University of Houston (UH).

"The key to developing an expressive writing intervention is the writing instruction. Otherwise, writing is just like a journal recording facts and events. Writing a journal can be therapeutic, but often we don't get the empirical evidence to determine whether it's effective or not," said Qian Lu, assistant professor and director of the Culture and Health Research Center at UH.

"In my research study, I found long-term physical and psychological health benefits when research participants wrote about their deepest fears and the benefits of a breast cancer diagnosis," she said.

Lu and colleagues published a study titled, "A Pilot Study of Expressive Writing Intervention Among Chinese-Speaking Breast Cancer Survivors," in Health Psychology. The goal of her research is to reduce the psychological burden among minority patients particularly among breast cancer survivors.

"Cancer patients, like war veterans in Iraq, can experience post-traumatic stress symptoms. Many times when cancer patients get diagnosed, they face lots of emotional trauma. There's a sense of loss, depression, anxiety about going into treatment and how they are going to face the future," said Lu. "They have a lot of emotional events going on in their life."

In her research, Lu, found little attention paid to Asian-American breast cancer survivor's psychological needs. Previous studies largely focused on non-Hispanic white samples, and she found a need to research this understudied population. Some of the challenges she noted with this population were feeling stigmatized, shame associated with cancer, cultural beliefs of bearing the burden alone to avoid disrupting harmony, suppressing emotions, and a lack of trained mental health professionals with cultural and linguistic competency.

"We thought of a very interesting way to help this problem. It's actually fairly basic. It's to express emotions using writing," she said. "What's so interesting is that it has been proven as a scientific paradigm."

Scientists in Manchester have identified a protein that could help doctors decide which bladder cancer patients would benefit from a treatment that makes radiotherapy more effective. 

The team from The University of Manchester, funded by the Medical Research Council, found that patients whose bladder tumour had high levels of a protein, called 'HIF-1α', were more likely to benefit from having carbogen – oxygen mixed with carbon dioxide gas – and nicotinamide tablets at the same time as their radiotherapy. The treatment, called 'CON', makes radiotherapy more effective.

By comparing levels of HIF-1α in tissue samples from 137 patients who had radiotherapy on its own or with CON, the researchers found the protein predicted which patients benefited from having CON. High levels of the protein were linked to better survival from the disease when patients had radiotherapy and CON. Patients with low protein levels did not benefit from having CON with their radiotherapy.

The HIF-1α protein indicates low oxygen levels in tumour cells – a state known as 'hypoxia'. The CON treatment works by adding oxygen to the oxygen-deprived tumour cells which makes them more sensitive to the radiotherapy. The study is published in the British Journal of Cancer (BJC).

Study author, Professor Catharine West, a Cancer Research UK scientist at The University of Manchester, said: "Although we have another biomarker that can predict responsiveness to CON and radiotherapy in bladder cancer patients, our findings tell us a bit more about the characteristics of bladder cancer tumours and how they may respond to this treatment."

Study reveals acupuncture helps cut fatigue, anxiety and depression in patients using drugs to prevent recurrence

Use of electroacupuncture (EA) – a form of acupuncture where a small electric current is passed between pairs of acupuncture needles – produces significant improvements in fatigue, anxiety and depression in as little as eight weeks for early stage breast cancer patients experiencing joint pain related to the use of aromatase inhibitors (AIs) to treat breast cancer. The results of a randomized, placebo-controlled trial examining the intervention led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania are published online this week in the journal Cancer. The study is the first demonstration of EA's efficacy for both joint pain relief, as well as these other common symptoms.

The results build upon earlier findings reported in November 2013, showing that EA can decrease the joint pain reported by roughly 50 percent of breast cancer patients taking AIs – the most-commonly prescribed medications to prevent disease recurrence among post-menopausal women with early-stage, hormone receptor positive breast cancer. Despite their efficacy, the joint pain associated with the use of AIs often leads to fatigue, anxiety, depression, and sleep disturbances for these patients, which researchers suggest may cause premature discontinuation of the drug. Previous studies have shown that nearly half of women taking AIs do not complete their recommended course of treatment, and that those who stop taking the drugs or don't take them as prescribed have a higher chance of dying of both breast cancer and other causes.

"Since many patients experience pain, fatigue, anxiety and depression simultaneously, our results provide an opportunity to offer patients one treatment that may target multiple symptoms," said lead author Jun Mao, MD MSCE, associate professor of Family Medicine and Community Health in Penn's Perelman School of Medicine, who directs the Integrative Oncology program in the Abramson Cancer Center. "We see patients every day who are looking for ways to combat some of the side effects of their treatment. What is particularly significant about these new results is that we can now offer more evidence-based treatment and management solutions for these women."