As Alice Park reported for TIME, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force released new recommendations for breast cancer screening yesterday, suggesting that women begin routine screenings at age 50, as opposed to age 40, as long recommended by the American Cancer Society. Additionally, the group recommends that women between the ages of
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A team of Australian researchers are set to begin a clinical trial next year to see if a technique for regrowing breast tissue will prove successful in humans. The novel strategy, which could offer hope to breast cancer patients who have undergone mastectomies as part of treatment, involves placing a “scaffolding” in the breast, and
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It’s been a long three weeks for the American Cancer Society. The public relations nightmare that started with an admission to the New York Times that they’d overstated the benefits of detecting many cancers is continuing with new evidence that two of the most reliable screenings—Pap smears for cervical cancer and colonoscopies for …
Green tea may be considered a little woo-woo by some mainstream cancer experts but the popular beverage continues to creep toward credibility as a weapon against many forms of the disease. The best studies to date hint that green tea may help ward off cancers of the breast and prostate. And this week oral cancer came one step closer to …
Breast cancer surgeons have long wagged their fingers at patients warning them never to lift anything over 15 pounds, especially if lymph nodes were taken during surgery. Well, for any woman with a child (or groceries for that matter) the limitation is annoying at best, disempowering at worst.
That advice was rooted in the fear that …
Approximately 270,000 of the 10 million cancer survivors alive in the U.S. were diagnosed and treated before they were old enough to buy themselves a drink, according to the National Cancer Institute. Thanks to scientific advances, as many as 80 percent of children treated for cancer go on to live full lives, but the shadow of the …
A link between exposure to traumatic stress and cancer has long been suspected—but researchers don’t yet fully understand how severe stress could produce this insidious effect or which types of cancer might be most affected. A new study of cancer risk amongst Holocaust survivors offers some clues.
The research also suggests that …
During the past decade, a new class of drugs, called TNF inhibitors, has improved the lives of tens of thousands of people who suffer from painful autoimmune diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, and Crohn’s disease. But there is a catch: the same drugs that offer unmatched pain relief today might trigger a …
Over the last 15 years, the vast majority of American gynecologists have switched from using the traditional “pap” smear to screen for cervical cancer to another screening method called “liquid based cytology” (women may know the test by the popular brand name, ThinPrep). But a new study of nearly 90,000 women in Holland finds …
A new report from the American Cancer Society (ACS) calls for honing strategies to monitor people’s exposure to cancer-causing chemicals in the environment, including enhancing toxicity testing, enforcing regulatory standards, and lowering the public’s exposure when possible. Authors of the report put minimizing exposure to …
For two decades, the public-health message has been that cancer screening saves lives. In some cases, especially with cancers of the cervix and colon, screening does, in fact, work as it should: sniffing out disease at its earliest and most curable stages. But for breast and prostate cancers—two of the most widespread in the U.S.—the …
Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine say they may be hot on the heels of the Holy Grail of cancer therapy: a means to protect healthy tissue from the harmful effects of radiation treatment while speeding tumor death. The study, published this week in Science Translational Medicine, could one day be a game changer …
For any woman, a breast cancer diagnosis is a sucker punch to the gut, but a new Australian study finds that more well-educated women fare worse psychologically than their less-educated peers. For the cohort study, 1,684 women were recruited within 12 months of being diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. Each woman completed a standard, …
