“Fertility preservation is a rapidly developing field, and it is important that the different available options for fertility preservation be known worldwide for every woman facing cancer treatment,” Dr. Shai E. Elizur from McGill Reproduction Center, Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal, said. “Young women facing gonadotoxic treatment should be referred as soon as possible to a fertility specialist to consider fertility preservation options.”

Dr. Elizur and colleagues report the IVF characteristics and outcomes of 8 nulliparous women conservatively treated for well-differentiated endometrial adenocarcinoma who underwent 31 IVF cycles at Chaim Sheba Medical Center, Rabin Medical Center, or Laniado Hospital, all in Israel.

Compared with their total IVF population, the authors report, there were significantly more cycles in the endometrial carcinoma group in which the endometrial thickness was less than 8 mm, and none of the women in this group had endometrial responses of more than 10 mm (compared with 43.8% of IVF cycles in the total IVF population with endometrial thickness above 10 mm).

The fertilization rate of 58.6% in this group did not differ from the overall IVF population, the report indicates, and 6 of the 8 women (75%) conceived.

The pregnancy rates were 28% per cycle and 29.2% per transfer, the investigators say, and 4 women delivered 6 healthy offspring.

Three women experienced a recurrence of endometrial carcinoma within 18 to 44 months, the researchers note, but all were successfully retreated.

“Since hormonal treatment for endometrial cancer is still experimental, we follow these patients very closely by repeated endometrial samplings every 3-6 month,” Dr. Elizur said. “We would recommend definitive surgical treatment when the woman completed her family planning.”

“In vitro fertilization is probably a reasonable treatment option, because it will shorten the interval from the conservative to definitive cancer treatment along with offering the opportunity to cryopreserve embryos for future use combined with surrogacy,” the authors conclude.

“Patients’ prior misperceptions about clinical trials (e.g., fear being offered a trial, assume placebo is a possibility, think they will wait to consider a trial if nothing else works, and over-confidence in standard treatment) often prevent them from making an informed decision in the first step — they automatically say no,” Dr. Gwendolyn P. Quinn from H. L. Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, Tampa, Florida.

“Physicians can lead discussions about a clinical trial by dispelling common myths,” Dr. Quinn suggests.

Dr. Quinn and colleagues examined lung cancer patients’ knowledge, attitudes and behaviors regarding clinical trials for lung cancer in an effort to develop ways to increase patients’ knowledge and awareness of clinical trials. The investigators used a sample of 43 patients who underwent interviews.

New and existing patients expressed similar perceptions of clinical trials, including fear of being a “guinea pig,” the offer of a trial meant there was no hope, and misconception of purpose, the authors report.

Despite these perceptions, most respondents said they would still participate in a clinical trial if a physician offered one. Similarly, most former trial participants said they felt confident of their decision to participate in a clinical trial, the researchers note, even those whose health did not improve as a result of the trial.

Based on these interviews, the investigators created a letter to send to all new patients before their first appointment, explaining that offering a clinical trial at their hospital was the norm, to expect this discussion, and the option of standard treatment was also available.

After the introduction of this letter, lung cancer enrollment increased by 18% so that 81% of all eligible lung cancer patients were in a trial.

“Our next step involves creating a DVD for patients to watch either before their first appointment or as soon as they arrive in clinic,” Dr. Quinn said.

“The DVD will show the variety of patients who benefit from clinical trial participation (e.g., younger, newly diagnosed women, not just older white men) and emphasize that clinical trials are the norm at a research hospital and the offering of such should not be a cause of fear or concern to the patient but rather a source of hope.”

The second phase will be to identify the needs of caregivers of lung patients and to develop educational interventions to address these needs, Dr. Quinn explained. “Decisions about trials are typically not made alone, and caregivers need to know what to expect. When fears of the unknown are alleviated in advance, there may be greater support from family/caregivers for clinical trial participation.”

Other packs will show a toddler with tubes running up his nostrils with the caption “Your smoking kills babies”, rather than the milder, pictureless warning “Cigarette smoking is injurious to health” currently displayed.

More than 2,500 Indians die every day due to diseases linked to consumption of tobacco products, according to official figures, and the health ministry admits laws banning smoking in public places have had little impact.

“Tobacco consumption is one of the main villains in our country,” Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said at a conference aimed at curbing tobacco use.

The pictorial warnings will also be plastered over packs of bidis — popular handrolled cigarettes that are cheaper than filtered brands — and packets and tins of chewing tobacco, which are popular with millions of Indians.

All tobacco products will also have to show a skull and crossbones image on their packaging, besides messages such as “Tobacco causes a slow and painful death”, officials say.

More than 200 million Indians use tobacco products regularly.

The World Health Organization says chewing tobacco is addictive and linked to cancers of the head, neck, throat and esophagus.

In India, more than 45 percent of adult males consume tobacco products and officials say smoking is becoming more popular among younger people.

The country, burdened by a surfeit of health problems ranging from HIV/AIDS to polio to child malnutrition, reports over 800,000 deaths annually due to tobacco-related diseases.

Officials say given that a third of India’s 1.1 billion people are illiterate picture warnings are vital.

“We need to shock people. Nothing else seems to help,” a health ministry official who could not be named said.

Australia, Singapore and Canada are among countries to have already made it mandatory to have pictorial warnings on cigarette packets. Belgium plans to launch a similar campaign from May.

Studies in Canada have shown that such warnings encouraged many smokers to cut down and others to quit.

Ramadoss said that with hundreds of millions of young people, India needed to step up its anti-tobacco campaign, especially as Bollywood often glamorized smoking.

More than 50 million Indians are dependent on the tobacco sector and the cigarette industry, which provides billions of rupees as revenue to the government each year.

India’s biggest cigarette-maker, ITC Ltd., said it would comply with the June deadline for pictorial warnings.

“I like to think of our project as the colonic variation of the Helicobacter pylori and gastric cancer story,” Dr. Mark M. Huycke from University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma said. “We hypothesize that commensal bacteria play a significant role in generating chromosomal instability by abnormally activating colonic macrophages and that this leads to sporadic colorectal cancer through a bystander effect.

Dr. Huycke and Dr. Xingmin Wang investigated whether E. faecalis, which produces extracellular superoxide, could promote chromosomal instability in hybrid hamster cells containing human chromosome 11.

The fraction of hamster cells bearing mutations increased in a dose dependent manner in the presence of E. faecalis, the researchers report, whereas E. coli did not.

E. faecalis induced chromosomal instability by way of extracellular superoxide-mediated cyclooxygenase (COX)-2 expression, the results indicated.

The process involved macrophages that generated COX-2 in response to superoxide and produced diffusible mediators that promoted chromosomal instability in neighboring cells through a bystander effect, the researchers note.

“In this scenario, sporadic colorectal cancer is a disease of innate immunity produced by a specific bacterial trigger,” Dr. Huycke said. “We selected E. faecalis to test this theory because of its unusual redox properties, but have no reason to doubt that other bacteria might not also trigger macrophages to induce a bystander effect.”

“Understanding the role of commensal bacteria in the etiology of colon cancer will open new avenues for pharmaceutical intervention and, potentially, suggest preventive strategies using probiotics,” Dr. Huycke concluded.

These findings “provide further evidence for the importance of colonic microflora in colon carcinogenesis,” writes Dr. Frank A. Sinicrope from Mayo Clinic and Mayo College of Medicine, Rochester, Minnesota in a related editorial. “Studies to replicate these provocative data in an in vivo model are eagerly awaited and have the potential to further our understanding of colon carcinogenesis and also to influence strategies for colorectal cancer prevention.”

Historically, survival has been estimated based on risk at diagnosis, Dr. Samuel J. Wang and his associates note, whereas conditional survival takes into account patients’ declining risk over time.

So if a patient is still alive 3 years after diagnosis, his chances of continued survival are better than they were during the first year, Dr. Wang, from the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, and his associates explain.

The researchers’ analyses are based on the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program from the National Cancer Institute.

The investigators’ target was patients diagnosed between 1988 and 1995 with non-small-cell lung cancer, followed through 2002. Their goal was to compute 5-year conditional survival rates for patients who had already survived up to 5 years after diagnosis.

The 96,480-patient cohort was 80% white, 4% Hispanic, 12% African-American, 5% Asian or Pacific Islander, and 0.4% Native American or Alaskan Natives. Other model variables were age (greater than or less than 70 years), gender, and stage of cancer. The authors presented their results as a set of histograms.

Survival increased further each year after diagnosis. Overall 5-year conditional survival ranged between 10% and 20% during the first year, to about 70% at year 5.

Generally, ethnic groups were more alike than different, Dr. Wang said, adding that they tended to “huddle together” as their “conditional survival curves moved in tandem.”

In most conditions, African-Americans had slightly lower relative conditional survival, but Dr. Wang noted that the difference rarely rose above 5% compared with whites. The discrepancy was widest “in earlier stage disease, male patients, age > 70 years, and squamous cell histology.”

In contrast, for blacks with “advanced stage disease or large cell histology or who were female,” conditional survival increased more over time, exceeding that of white individuals.

Stage I and II cancers did not change much over time, but stages III and IV saw much steeper increases in conditional survival over time.

“Our next step will be to use more sophisticated statistical analysis to generate a more accurate predictive model,” Dr. Wang said. As a result, they hope to identify “better parameters that would allow us to make individualized predictions for patients.”

An estimated 3.2 million people in Europe were diagnosed with the disease in 2006, compared to 2.9 million two years earlier, and 1.7 million died from the illness.

Lung cancer, most of which is caused by smoking, is the biggest killer with about 334,800 deaths, followed by colorectal, breast and stomach cancer.

“Cancer remains an important public health problem in Europe and the ageing of the European population will cause these numbers to continue to increase, even if age-specific rates of cancer remain constant,” said Professor Peter Boyle, the director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France.

The population of the 25 European Union countries is expected to remain constant at about 500 million. But between the year 2000 and 2015 there will be a 22 percent increase in the number of people over 65 and a 50 percent rise in those over 80.

Cancer occurs more frequently in older people. Longer exposure to carcinogens, radiation and tobacco increases the susceptibility of developing the illness.

“The longer you are exposed in general terms, the higher your risk of developing cancer,” said Boyle.

In a report published in the journal Annals of Oncology, Boyle warned more needs to be done particularly in Central and Eastern Europe to curb the increase in leading cancers.

“I think the biggest disaster is the number of people who die from cancers related to cigarette smoking,” Boyle added in an interview.

He estimated that if people didn’t smoke, cancer deaths in Europe could be cut by between a third and 40 percent.

“Tobacco control has got to be number one priority if we want to be serious about deaths from cancer. It is by far the biggest thing we could do,” Boyle said.

Colorectal cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in European men and women but organised screening programmes can be effective in diagnosing the illness, according to Boyle.

Mammograms have increased the detection of breast cancer, the most commonly diagnosed cancer overall, but deaths rose from 130,000 in 2004 to 131,900 in 2006.

“Tobacco control and effective population-based screening with good-quality control guidelines in place would reduce the cancer burden dramatically,” said Boyle.

“This work provides evidence that early life environmental considerations, as reflected by family structure, affect the risk of cancer 6 to 7 decades later, quite late in life,” Dr. Martin J. Blaser from New York University School of Medicine, New York said. “This is the striking observation.”

Dr. Blaser and colleagues investigated the association of early-life family structure and H. pylori cagA status with the risk of developing gastric cancer decades later in 261 Japanese-American men who developed gastric cancer over a 28-year observation period and 261 matched controls.

Men who developed gastric cancer were 2.97 times as likely as men who didn’t develop cancer to have H. pylori infection and 1.8 times as likely to have cagA-positive strains of H. pylori, the authors report.

Although there was no significant association of family size or birth order with gastric cancer risk overall, the results indicate, H. pylori-positive men who were born in the largest sibships were significantly more likely to develop gastric cancer than men in smaller sibships.

Men from the largest sibships who also carried cagA-positive H. pylori were at the greatest risk of developing gastric cancer, the researchers note.

In H. pylori-positive men, higher (later) birth order increased the risk of developing intestinal but not diffuse-type gastric cancer, the report indicates. The same was true for men with cagA-positive strains.

“The results imply that individuals who belong to high-risk populations–East Asians, Eastern Europeans, and Latin Americans who are late-born siblings in large sibship–should be screened particularly carefully, because they are at highest risk,” Dr. Blaser said.

We think of H. pylori as the indicator organism for a potentially large group of indigenous microbes that gradually are disappearing from human ecosystems,” Dr. Blaser explained. “As is the case for H. pylori, these changes may have important implications for health and disease.”

Drinking green tea may reduce the risk of advanced prostate cancer, according to a study by researchers at Japan’s National Cancer Center.

It said men who drank five or more cups a day might halve the risk of developing advanced prostate cancer compared with those who drank less than one cup a day.

“This does not mean that people who drink green tea are guaranteed to have reduced risk of advanced prostate cancer,” said Norie Kurahashi, a scientist who took part in the study.

“We are just presenting our results. But the study does point to the hope that green tea reduces the risk of advanced prostate cancer.”

Prostate cancer is much less common among Asian men than Western men, and that may be partly due to the effects of the high consumption of green tea in Asia, the study said.

But it said further studies are needed to confirm the preventive effects of green tea on prostate cancer, including well-designed clinical trials.

The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, compiled data from 50,000 men aged 40-69 over a period of up to 14 years from 1990.

British charity Cancer Research UK says on its Web site that a study of almost 20,000 Japanese men published in the British Journal of Cancer in 2006 found no relationship between green tea and prostate cancer.

CHICAGO – A highly sensitive microchip may help doctors detect rare traces of cancer circulating in the bloodstream, offering a way to better manage treatment, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

The device can isolate, count and analyze circulating tumor cells from a blood sample, the team at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston said.

These circulating tumor cells, or CTCs, are the tiniest fragments of tumors, which are carried in the blood.

Doctors have known about them for some time, but because they are so rare and so fragile, they have been hard to trap and study in a meaningful way.

“What our technology does is increase the sensitivity many, many fold, to a point where it can become a tool that can be used clinically,” said Mehmet Toner, whose group developed the device.

He said routine monitoring of these cells could help doctors tailor treatments to patients and may one day aid with diagnosis.

“Nine out 10 deaths in cancer are due to the metastatic process because the cancer spreads to other parts of the body,” said Toner, whose study appears in the journal Nature.

“These are really the cells that end up killing people.”

Current blood tests to detect these rare cells involved many steps of mixing and spinning and shaking, often killing what few cells they found.

“We went to the blackboard and designed it from scratch,” Toner said in a telephone interview.

Trapping cancer cells
The device they made uses a business-card sized silicon chip. It has microscopic posts that are coated with antibodies that recognize cancer cells.

As blood flows over the chip, these posts act like glue, trapping cancer cells and leaving blood cells behind.

Older methods may have produced one to five cells out of 60 billion cells screened in an 8-milliliter tube of blood. The new device can find 1,000 cancer cells.

The researchers tested their chip against blood samples from 68 patients with five types of tumors — lung, prostate, breast, pancreatic and colorectal.

Out of 116 samples, they found circulating tumor cells in all but one sample, and none were found in samples taken from healthy people.

And the test was sensitive enough to detect changes in circulating tumor cell levels during treatment, with drops in detected CTC levels matching tumor shrinkage seen on standard CT scans.

“Suddenly, we have a great opportunity to have an impact in cancer in major ways,” Toner said.

He said the technology will allow for much more personalized cancer care. “You get a sense of how a patient is responding to treatment.”

Eventually, it also may prove useful for cancer screening. And ready access to live cancer cells will advance cancer research.

“We will start to understand the biology of cancer much better,” Toner said.

1. Avoid Smoking and Secondhand Smoke
We hear a dozen times a day how bad cigarettes are for us and the risk of lung cancer. Why? Because smoking is the most significant risk factors for cancer that we can reduce. Did you know that smoking increases your risk factor for devloping dozens of types of cancer?

2. Practice Safe Sex and Limit the Amount of Partners You Have
Having unprotected sex with many partners raises your risk factor for contracting a virus called the Human Papilloma Virus, or HPV for short. HPV has been linked to several different types of cancers, mainly cervical cancer. It is estimated that almost 80% of women have HPV.

3. Get Regular Pap Smears
Getting a regular Pap smear can detect changes in the cervix before they become cancerous. A regular Pap smear is one of the best tools a woman has to prevent cervical cancer.

4. Pass on that Last Call for Alcohol.
Studies have determined that women who drink alcoholic beverages develop cancer at a higher rate. How much is too much? Based on studies, ladies who consume 2 to 5 drinks daily have about 1½ times the risk of women who don’t consume alcohol.

5. Get Moving.
Did you know that when you are exercising, you are reducing your risk for many types of cancer? The American Cancer Society recommends exercising 30 or minutes, at least 5 days a week!Exercising doesn’t mean having to go to the gym to lift weights. Check out the “Top 10 Ways to Prevent Cancer Through Exercise” for some great gym alternatives.

6. Eat a Low Fat, Sensible Diet.
Eating a diet low in animal fats has been shown to reduce the irsk of many types of cancer. It also curbs obesity, which is a risk factor for many types of cancer. Maintaining a healthy weight is essential!

7. Be Sun Savvy!
Using suncreen properly and staying out of the sun during peak hours is essential to preventing skin cancer. If you are looking for a tan, try some tanning alternives like cosmetic bronzers and self tanning creams. New forumlas don’t leave your skin looking orange.

8. Know Your Family History of Cancer
Knowing your family history of cancer is very important to properly assess your risk factor for certain types of cancer. We know that cancers like breast, colon, ovarian, and possibly other types can be hereditary.

If you know that a certain type of cancer runs in your family, let your doctor know. Together, you can determine a prooper screening plan and assess your true risk factor. Genetic testing and counseling are available for some.