Posted on May 11th, 2007
Scandinavian moist snuff (snus) has been proposed as a less harmful alternative to smoking, but precise data on the independent associations of snus use with site-specific cancers are sparse.
Detailed information about tobacco smoking and snus use was obtained from 279 897 male Swedish construction workers.
125 576 workers reported to be never-smokers at entry.
60 cases of oral, 154 of lung, and 83 of pancreatic cancer were recorded in never-smokers.
Snus use was independently associated with increased risk of pancreatic cancer (relative risk for ever-users of snus 2·0; 95% CI 1·2–3·3, compared with never-users of any tobacco), but was unrelated to incidence of oral (0·8, 95% CI 0·4–1·7) and lung cancer (0·8, 0·5–1·3).
Posted on May 11th, 2007
A new breast cancer drug Avastin, has been licensed in UK.
The new drug – Avastin is designed to be used in tandem with another chemotherapy agent, paclitaxel.
Avastin, has previously been used to treat bowel cancer.
In trials, breast cancer patients who took Avastin and paclitaxel went an average of 13 months without their cancer growing, compared with an average of 6.7 months for patients who took paclitaxel alone.
Posted on May 10th, 2007
A common virus, believed to be transmitted during oral sex, is the cause of a rare throat cancer in both men and women.
Were researched 100 patients with newly diagnosed oropharyngeal cancer and 200 control patients without cancer to evaluate associations between HPV(human papillomavirus) infection and oropharyngeal cancer.
Conclusions
Oral HPV infection is strongly associated with oropharyngeal cancer among subjects with or without the established risk factors of tobacco and alcohol use.
In this study, were focused exclusively on oropharyngeal cancer, for which the molecular evidence of a causal role for HPV is compelling.
The association with oropharyngeal cancer increased significantly with the number of vaginal-sex partners or oral-sex partners and was markedly elevated among patients with a high lifetime number of such partners .
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The original and full text on- http://content.nejm.org/
Posted on May 9th, 2007
Taxotere (generic name: docetaxel) – new drug, which is described as being a chemotherapy drug, will be used to treat sufferers of head, neck, breast and lung cancers, was approved for use by the NHS in England and Wales last year.
Two years ago on the basis that it did not demonstrate value for money Taxotere was not approved.
Patients taking Taxotere had a 30% lower mortality rate than those receiving the standard treatment alone.
Taxotere, which was originally developed to treat breast cancer, has been shown to extend the survival time for men with prostate cancer by 25% over the standard treatment.
It is used when prostate cancer patients are no longer responding to hormone treatment, and reduces pain and weight loss.
