Blisstree » bone-cancer

Child Cancer Survivors Too Sedentary

Marijke Durning, RN — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 06:57:09 +0000

Researchers from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have found that survivors of childhood cancers are at higher risk for obesity, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes than their siblings who did not have cancer. The risk exists because the survivors tend to be more sedentary than the siblings.

The study, done across medical centers in the United States and Canada, looked at over 20,000 childhood cancer survivors. From those 20,000 people, over 9000 survey responses were received and analyzed, and these were compared to almost 3000 responses from siblings. The researchers were looking for the type of lifestyle the survivors led compared with their siblings.

According to this article, Childhood Cancer Survivors Exercise Less, Increasing Diabetes Risk,

Cancer treatments such as cranial radiation can damage the hypothalamus and pituitary; the result is an abnormal metabolism, which increases the risk of obesity and diabetes. Also, chemotherapy with the drug anthracycline increases the risk of heart disease; and radiation to the body can cause blood vessels to become less pliant.

Therefore, it’s even more important for cancer survivors to be as physically active as possible, one would think. However, that wasn’t what was found. Only 77% of cancer survivors were active over the previous month, compared with 86% of the siblings.

Of course, to be fair, the researchers had to take into account the types of cancers the survivors had and what the treatment results were. For example, someone with amputations may not be able to be as physically active as a sibling. As well, certain types of cancers, such as medulloblastoma (a brain tumor) and osteosarcoma (bone cancer) seemed to result in more sedentary lifestyles.

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Image: PhotoXpress.com

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Child Cancer Survivors Too Sedentary

Cryoablation for Pain Management?

Gloria Gamat — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:00:00 +0000

While cryoablation is working wonders in kidney cancer patients will unoperable tumors, the procedure has been found to offer durable pain relief of cancer that has spread to the bone – according to Mayo Clinic.

According to Matthew Callstrom, M.D., Ph.D., a radiologist at Mayo Clinic who presented his latest findings on cryoablation for pain management at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) annual meeting this week (Nov. 27):

“Cancer patients are living longer and we need to be able to manage their pain over a long period of time.

Two key parts of this study are that the reduction in pain lasts and their quality of life improves after receiving the treatment.”

Find more details from Mayo Clinic.

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Cryoablation for Pain Management?

Increased Chemotherapy Dose, Not Beneficial to Osteosarcoma Patients

Gloria Gamat — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 01:59:35 +0000

Compared to standard doses of chemotherapy, a dose-intensive regimen of cisplatin and doxorubicin offered no clinical benefit in patients with the bone cancer osteosarcoma.

Such were the findings of a randomized clinical trial whose data has been reported in the January 17 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

In other cancers such as non-Hodgkin lymphoma and breast cancer, increasing the intensity of a chemotherapy regimen (means decreasing the number of days between chemotherapy treatments) may improve survival, as been shown in previous studies.

But that wasn’t the case in osteosarcoma: while the dose-intensive regimen killed tumor cells better than the standard regimen after surgery, survival rates were similar in both groups.

Read more details from the full report or read a copy of the article.

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Increased Chemotherapy Dose, Not Beneficial to Osteosarcoma Patients