It looks like Patrick Swayze is fighting a good fight with his pancreatic cancer — which is really great news to hear.
All over the news are the following words this weekend by Patrick Swayze that is hopeful:
“…a miracle, dude.”
I don’t know why. I am juicing every day along with other treatments and all I can say is that it’s working fine and really well.”
The actor, according to reports has been undergoing chemotherapy and the new CyberKnife (robotic radiosurgery system) for the pancreatic cancer he was diagnosed with in March.
It’s really inspiring to see him up and about and getting back …read more

According to scientists at the University of Southern California (USC), in collaboration with Italian researchers, fasting (for 48 hours) before receiving chemotherapy could help limit the treatment’s toxic effects to cancer cells—and spare healthy ones.
Starving healthy cells helps to differentiate them from tumor cells, a trick that could make cancer treatments more effective.
The new finding may pave the way for higher and more frequent chemo doses that better shrink tumors without harming normal cells.
Any thoughts on the matter? I’d like to hear them.
Find more details from Scientific American.

Speaking of breast cancer…
Previously popular treatments – i.e. big-dose chemotherapy – apparently are of no help against breast cancer.
Such were the findings recently reported by a group of Houston researchers.
A grueling and controversial breast cancer treatment that was popular in the late 1980s and the 1990s does not extend the lives of patients in advanced stages of the disease
In releasing their report on a review of existing studies, the researchers said women who received high-dose chemotherapy, followed by transplants from their own bone marrow, fared no better than patients on other therapies.
Donald Berry, head of quantitative studies at the University …read more

One side effect of chemotherapy is loss of hair. For men, generally no problem because men are often sexier with shaved head or less hair. However, for women, our hair is our crowning glory.
Although I know one person in this world (my best friend) who was quite comfortable wearing a shaved head at one time in her life (not because of chemotherapy, she just decided that shaved is the in thing and got away with it), most women wouldn’t be as comfortable with a shaved head or an almost-shaved head, even as a consequence of cancer treatments.
Some cancer patients though, …read more

In women with operable HER-2 positive breast cancer, the combination treatment of the antibody trastuzumab and chemotherapy has been found to improve survival.
Such were the findings of the meta-analysis of 5 trials involving more than 13,000 women with operable breast cancer, recently reported at the ESMO Conference Lugano by Issa Dahabreh from University of Athens:
The results showed that combining trastuzumab with chemotherapy results in a -34% reduction in mortality and a 38% increase in disease-free survival. Those survival benefits were accompanied by decreases in the risk of both locoregional and distant recurrences of the cancer.
Taken together, these results confirm that …read more

According to a new systematic review, when chemotherapy is given to women with operable breast cancer before having the surgery (not after), it helps oncologists to pin down the best treatment regimen and can reduce the extent of surgery.
Preoperative chemotherapy reduced chemo-related infections by 4 percent and the need for mastectomies by 17 percent when compared to postoperative chemotherapy.
The said review was led by Sven Mieog, M.D., of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.
As rationalized by the experts, the advantages of preoperative chemotherapy are:

tumors are already shrunk before surgery
allows the doctors to see if a tumor is resistant to …read more

In patients with stage IIIA non-small-cell lung cancer, radiation may be a better option than surgery after an initial chemotherapy treatment – according to a randomized controlled trial conducted by Jan van Meerbeeck, M.D., Ph.D., of the University Hospital of Ghent in Belgium, and colleagues from the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC).
The researchers found that surgery, compared to radiation, did not improve survival after treatment with chemotherapy.
…radiation was the preferred treatment because of its lower rate of complications and mortality in lung cancer patients.
Surgery and chemotherapy has been previously found to be superior to chemotherapy alone …read more

Giving patients both radiation and chemotherapy after completely removing invasive pancreatic cancer may improve overall survival rates, according to researchers from Mayo Clinic Cancer Center.
Such finding has been reported by Michele Corsini, M.D., a radiation oncology resident in Rochester and the study’s lead author, at the recent 2007 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium.

in patients who received concurrent radiation and chemotherapy following surgery: 50 percent survived two years and 28 percent surviving at least five years.
in patients who did not receive additional therapy after surgery: 39% survived two years and 17 percent survived five years.

Currently, Mayo Clinic is using a treatment strategy for …read more

If you were diagnosed with a certain cancer and told that it’s inoperable and that your only option for treatment is chemotherapy, would you agree to undergo such an ordeal?
We all know that chemotherapy is debilitating in itself and how a patient reacts to it varies:
…on some occasions, chemotherapy can cause permanent changes or damage to the heart, lungs, nerves, kidneys, reproductive or other organs. And certain types of chemotherapy may have delayed effects, such as a second cancer, that show up many years later.
The National Cancer Institite clearly illustrates point by point the following chemotheraphy side efftects:
Fatigue, pain, hair loss, …read more

U.S. researchers have recently reported that in children with brain tumors called medulloblastomas, a highly targeted treatment that relies on the patient’s own stem cells led to improved outcomes: from 30-40% chance of surviving to five years to 70-80%.
Chemotherapy usually lasts for 12 months. In this new treatment regimen, radiation therapy is tailored to the severity of the disease and is then followed by a shorter course of chemotherapy. Stem cells are taken from a child (the patient) before chemotherapy and then implanted back after each round of chemotherapy, making the shorter course possible because the process essentially allowed the …read more