cancer
oracknows | May 9, 2010I'm a bit of an odd bird in the world of cancer. No, it's not because I run a snarky skeptical blog that routinely deconstructs the nonsense that alt-med practitioners sprew far and wide, nor is it because I've developed a middling level of popularity that shocks me from time to time. Nor is it because I've taken on an obscure pseudonym based on a computer that looked like a Plexiglass box full of colored blinking lights from an even more obscure late 1970s British science fiction show with the low-budget asthetic of Tom Baker-era Doctor Who, although personally I sometimes wonder what it…
revere | May 8, 2010President Obama got some advice yesterday from a special Presidential Cancer Panel. The Panel was mandated under the National Cancer Act of 1971 and included a strong staff and leading cancer specialists. The focus was on cancers we get from environmental exposures. It is strong stuff, but it is also stuff experts in cancer epidemiology have known for a long time. Unfortunately the environmental cancer prevention message too often gets submerged in the "you gave cancer to yourself because of how you live" message or triumphant news about the latest therapy for cancer you've already got (the…
dblum | May 7, 2010The title of this post is taken from today's opinion piece by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, which focuses on carcinogens in our daily life and our failure to regulate exposure to dangerous compounds.
Kristof's point is that we should do a better job of protecting ourselves and our environment from industrial compounds. No argument there. He goes on to say that a "proliferation of chemicals in water, foods, air and household products" is suspected as a factor in rising cancer rates. Yes, argument here.
Because, geez, water is a chemical compound (hydrogen and oxygen). And the…
sa smith | May 7, 2010WARNING: Get a box of Kleenex before you read this post! I am NOT joking.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on how scientists are using a genetically modified herpes simplex-1 virus to attack metastatic melanoma (an oncolytic, ie kills tumor cells, virus). The results of their clinical trials blew my mind.
Today I found out (thanks to an awesome reader!), that they are trying a similar protocol in a 13 year old kid with rhabdomyosarcoma. What this boy has been through:
Now 13-years-old, Evan was diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma in June 2008 at the age of 11...
... He's endured 28 rounds of…
sastyk | May 6, 2010I've got a class and Eric's got a final today, plus kid stuff, so I won't have time to read through the President's Cancer Panel Report today, but I do think it is worth noting that the recommendation that we start thinking more seriously about environmental factors and the health consequences they have has reached the mainstream. We know appallingly little about the chemical experiments we are enacting upon ourselves - we know very little, for example, about how they affect develping fetuses, despite the heavy prenatal exposure all our kids get. We know very little about the aggregate…
revere | May 5, 2010Regular readers know I don't have strong feelings about nutritional supplements and herbal medicine, unlike some of my medical blogger colleagues. I don't recommend or use them but for the most part it's not a subject that really gets me going, probably because I don't know enough about abuses. A lot of regular medical practice is not that soundly based, either, and some of it is pretty harmful. That's also not a subject that gets me going.
The one prejudice I do have I got from my physician and surgeon father. His diet advice was "everything in moderation." That goes for nutritional…
sa smith | May 4, 2010Hey, you guys remember a while back, when Casey 'Tits' Luskin about peed his pants because 'ERVS AR BE FUNKSHUNAL!!'
Except, this is really another case of Creationists not knowing the difference between an ERV, solo LTRs, and random wayward ERV genes.
And those solo LTRs that could theoretically still act as a promoter, really dont all that often.
Well, like I have said a million times on this blog, these solo LTRs, like all endogenous retroviral bits are not usually good things, CAUSE THEY CAUSE CANCER.
Furthermore, Creationists (and wooists as a whole) are madly in love with epigenetics.…
oracknows | May 3, 2010As I pointed out yesterday before stirring things up a bit, I was up most of the night Sunday night working on a grant (two, actually), and I went full tilt all day yesterday to get it done. Consequently, last night I was in no shape to blog. I chilled. I copied. I picked a rerun. Interestingly, I remembered this post, which was something I did way back in early 2005. the last time I reran it was in 2006; so if you've been reading less than four years, it's new to you, and I'll be back for sure tumorrow. It's also interesting because this post is of a style and subject matter that I don't…
oracknows | April 27, 2010I never would have thought it possible, but it's happened.
I'm sure most of you have heard of Dr. Andrew Weil, that champion of quackademic medicine who has made it his life's mission to bring the woo into academia in the form of training programs to "integrate" quackery with science-based medicine. From his home base at the University of Arizona, he spreads the woo hither and yon throughout academia, racking up big speaking fees wherever he goes and building a multimedia empire of books, DVDs, TV appearances, and Internet presence. Not satistfied, last year in the early stages of the debate…
tsmith | April 26, 2010Student guest post by Andrew Behan
Malignant Mesothelioma (MM) is a rare type of cancer which manifests itself in the thin cells lining the human body's internal organs. There are three types of MM; pleural mesothelioma, peritoneal mesothelioma, and pericardial mesothelioma, affecting the lining of the lungs, abdominal cavity, and lining of the heart, respectively (1). Pleural mesothelioma is most common, consisting of about 70% of all MM cases and has a poor prognosis; patients live a median time of 18 months after diagnosis. (Note: for the purposes of this article, MM will be used to…
terrasig | April 23, 2010KFC and Komen?
BucketsfortheCure.com?
Why don't they just put a pink ribbon on a pack of cigarettes?
jgoldman | April 21, 2010This seems to have become unofficial volcano week, here at ScienceBlogs. If you haven't been following the coverage of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption at Erik Klemetti's Eruptions blog, you should consider doing so. Also, Dr. Isis has a post on how the eruption has fouled up all nuclear imaging plans at her place of research, and Ethan explains how volcanic lightening works.
Our benevolent overlords have further commented: "Eyjafjallajökull's ill temper has been an unexpected object lesson in the complexity and interconnectedness of our environment, technology, and social networks." To that I…
oracknows | April 20, 2010The following is a rather curious promotional video that was shown at the plenary sessions of the AACR 2010 meeting. I first saw it yesterday, and thought my readers might be interested in it while I'm winding my way home:
It's basically a compendium of various facts about cancer and cancer research with a rather obnoxious techno soundtrack to make it "hip" in the way that middle-aged white guys think is "hip." (Believe it or not, the AACR actually played this loud enough to feel the bass.) Annoying music aside, though, the graphics in the video compellingly boil down a large amount of…
terrasig | April 19, 2010The 101st Annual Meeting of my primary professional society, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), convened in Washington, DC, on Saturday and will run through Wednesday, April 21. The theme for this year's meeting is "Conquering Cancer Through Discovery Research," and focuses strongly on the translation of discoveries into cancer treatments.
Although the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic dust cloud has delayed many European participants, over 17,000 attendees are expected at the Washington Convention Center where over 6,300 presentations are to be given.
AACR was founded in 1907 by 11…
oracknows | April 19, 2010I've pivoted immediately from attending NECSS and participating in a panel on the infiltration of quackery into academia to heading down to Washington, DC for the AACR meeting. Then, after a packed day of meetings yesterday followed by spending yesterday evening with a friend whom I haven't seen for a long time, there's--gasp!--no new material today. Fortunately, there is this amusing little thing from two and a half years ago (which means it's new to you if you haven't been reading that long). It's also very appropriate, given that I'm at a big cancer research meeting and the decreasing…
oracknows | April 8, 2010Eat your fruits and vegetables.
Hasn't that been a constant refrain over the years from public health authorities? Certainly, I have. The benefits of eating fruits and vegetables have been widely touted, and seemingly with good reason. A diet high in fruits and vegetables, it is said, reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer. In the case of the latter, it as claimed that potential decreases in the risks of some cancers could be as high as 50% a day. As a result, the National Cancer Institute developed the 5-A-Day program, whose goal was to increase people's consumption of fruits…
sa smith | April 7, 2010Metastatic melanoma is definately one of the Cancers That Suck.
We basically have the same treatment options in 2010 as they had back in 1975... and not because we have chemotherapy/immunotherapy that works super great, no reason to change it. Our treatment options just suck, with horrible consequences-- Say you have 100 friends that are diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic melanoma today. One year from today, only about 25, 26 of those friends will still be alive.
~25.
Out of 100.
Survive one year after diagnosis.
Maybe fewer (this paper Im reading says 25.5%, Wikipedia says 9-15%).…
oracknows | April 7, 2010Beware, North Carolina. Beware. Your law has become quack-friendly to the point where doctors can do almost anything.
Why, you may reasonably wonder, am I saying this? The answer is what appears to be the end of a long and painful story of cancer quackery and anti-vaccine celebrity that has tainted North Carolina for years now. Do you remember Dr. Rashid Buttar? Regular readers know who he is, as he's been a recurring character on this blog since the very beginning. Most recently, he figured prominently in the case of Desiree Jennings, the young woman who claimed that the flu vaccine caused a…
sa smith | March 30, 2010Once again, ERVs, the best goddamn workhorse in the stable, have provided another great example for explaining How the World Works. This time? How a functional ERV protein interacts with normal cellular proteins to cause epigenetic changes that lead to cancer:
Human Endogenous Retrovirus Protein Rec interacts with the Testicular Zinc Finger Protein and Androgen Receptor.
WARBLEGARBLE!!! FUNCTIONAL ERVs!
WARBLEGARBLE!!! EPIGENETICS!
EVERYTHING YOUVE BEEN TOLD ABOUT EVILUTION IS WRONG!
JESUS IS LORD!
heh.
That title/abstract looks scary (okay, it is scary. there is a reason I didnt go into…
oracknows | March 22, 2010Here we go again.
Every so often, it seems, the media has to recycle certain scare stories based on little or no science. Be it vaccines and whether they cause autism or not (the don't) or various environmental exposures supposedly linked to various cancers or other diseases in which the science is far more complex or tentative than represented, convincing people that some common thing to which we are routinely exposed is going to kill them seldom fails to bring in the readers. One of the favorite targets of this is the ubiquitous cell phone, and there have been two hunks o' burnin' stupid…