ALZHEIMER´S TIED TO LESS CANCER, AND VICE VERSA.

Alzheimer's tied to less cancer, and vice versa

People with Alzheimer's disease have a lower risk of cancer than other elderly adults, a new Italian study suggests.

Additionally, researchers found that seniors who were diagnosed with cancer were less likely to develop Alzheimer's.

Researchers said there are a number of genes that affect both neurology and cancer growth - and pathways by which the two are connected - that could explain the "unexpected" inverse link between the diseases.

"Cancer and Alzheimer's have been viewed by researchers as completely separate," said Dr. Massimo Musicco, who led the study at the National Research Council of Italy's Institute of Biomedical Technologies in Milan.

"Some of the knowledge that we have on cancer can be used for a better understanding of what happens when a person has Alzheimer's disease, and vice versa," he said.

There are convincing data that Parkinson's disease is tied to a lower risk of cancer, said Dr. Jane Driver, who studies aging at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

More recently, the same pattern has been showing up for other neurological disorders, including schizophrenia and Alzheimer's, she noted.

But earlier studies haven't been able to rule out whether Alzheimer's disease might be keeping cancer symptoms from being noticed - or vice versa - or if people who die from one disease just have less time to be diagnosed with the other.

In their study, Musicco and his colleagues found people who ultimately were diagnosed with Alzheimer's had a lower risk of cancer both leading up to and after their diagnosis.

Likewise those with cancer were less likely to get Alzheimer's both before and after the cancer was caught.

"I'm hoping this will then convince all the doubters that there is a true inverse association between Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and probably some other neurologic diseases and cancer," Driver told Reuters Health.

Musicco and his team tracked new cancer and Alzheimer's diagnoses among 204,000 people age 60 and older living in Northern Italy.

Between 2004 and 2009, just over 21,000 of them were diagnosed with cancer and close to 3,000 with Alzheimer's disease. There were 161 people diagnosed with both diseases.

The researchers calculated that 246 cases of Alzheimer's disease would be expected in members of the cancer group, based on their age and gender balance, and 281 cancers would be predicted among those with Alzheimer's.

The lower rates meant that people with cancer were 35 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than other adults, the researchers wrote in the journal Neurology. And those with Alzheimer's had a 43 percent lower risk of cancer.

Source: NBC News Health

THE TALLER THE WOMAN, THE HIGHER HER CANCER RISK

The ability to reach items on high shelves and easily see through a crowd may no longer have the same appeal for some women. A study recently published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention finds a link between postmenopausal women's height and cancers.

According to the study, the taller a woman's stature is, the higher her risk of cancer at a number of different sites, including breast, colon, endometrium, kidney, ovary, rectum and thyroid. Additionally, taller women have a greater risk of developing multiple myeloma and melanoma.

All of these associations did not change after adjusting for known influencers of these cancers, such as age, weight, education, smoking habits, alcohol intake and hormone therapy. The researchers say that height even had more influence over cancer risk than a common measure of obesity, body mass index (BMI).

Researchers studied 144,701 women aged 50 to 79 who participated in the Women's Health Initiative from 1993 to 1998. After a follow-up 12 years later, in total, 20,928 cancers were identified within the group.

Results showed that for every 10-centimeter increase in height (3.94 inches), there was a 13% increase in likelihood of developing cancer.

Specifically:

·         An increase in risk of 13-17% for breast, ovary, endometrium and colon cancers, as well as for melanoma, and

·         An increase in risk of 23-29% for kidney, rectum, thyroid and blood cancers.

There were 19 cancers studied in total, none of which displayed a negative association with height.

Geoffrey Kabat - senior epidemiologist in the department of epidemiology and population health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University, New York, NY - says:

"We were surprised at the number of cancer sites that were positively associated with height. In this data set, more cancers are associated with height than were associated with body mass index.

Ultimately, cancer is a result of processes having to do with growth, so it makes sense that hormones or other growth factors that influence height may also influence cancer risk."

Various studies in the past have looked at personal characteristics in relation to cancers. For example, a recent study linked height and BMI to ovarian cancer. An interesting note made by the current researchers is that both height and BMI have been increasing by about 1 cm each decade in high-income countries, potentially increasing the risk for cancer in the process.

Few previous studies have adjusted for other known influencers of cancer when researching the effect of height.

Dr. Geoffrey Kabat makes the obvious point that, unlike other risk factors such as diet and lifestyle, height is not something we can change. He adds, however:

"Although it is not a modifiable risk factor, the association of height with a number of cancer sites suggests that exposures in early life, including nutrition, play a role in influencing a person's risk of cancer."

While the researchers found an association between cancer and height, the medical evidence shows it is a complex disease that cannot be linked purely to one factor.

Source: Medical News Today

SURGEON´S SMART KNIFE DETECT CANCER CELLS IN TUMOUR OPERATIONS

When surgeons remove tumor tissue they try to leave a "margin" of healthy tissue to ensure all the cancer is removed. Sometimes this means the patient has to remain under general anaesthetic for another 30 minutes or so while tissue samples are sent for analysis to check if the margin is clear. Even then, it is still possible that some cancerous tissue remains, and the patient has to undergo further surgery to remove it.

Now, a new technique based on an "intelligent knife," called the "iKnife," promises to remove the need for lab analysis and the accompanying delay, and it also helps avoid repeat surgeries.

The iKnife sniffs the "smoke" created by the electrosurgical removal of cancerous tissue and tells the surgeon almost immediately if the tissue it has come from is healthy or cancerous.

This first study appears online this week in Science Translational Medicine, in which the iKnife is tested in the operating room.

In tissue samples from 91 patients, researchers at Imperial College London using the iKnife achieved 100% accuracy in diagnosing whether the samples were cancerous or not.

Study author Dr. Zoltan Takats is the inventor of the iKnife. Asked if his new surgical tool would be confined to use in only certain types of cancer, he told Medical News Today:

"It is a generally applicable tool, we believe it will be useful for many different types of cancer surgeries."

On the question of cost-effectiveness, Dr. Takats told us:

"We believe that it will be a cost-saver - due to elimination of intraoperative histology, shorter intervention times and lower rate of re-operations."

iKnife combines electrosurgery with new mass spectrometry techniques

The iKnife is a combination of an established technology called electrosurgery that was invented in the 1920s and a new technology that is still emerging, called rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometry (REIMS).

In electrosurgery, the surgeon's knife delivers an electric current that heats the target tissue and cuts through it while causing minimum loss of blood.

The heat from the current vaporizes the tissue, which gives off a smoke that is normally sucked away with an extractor.

The mass spectrometer technology behind REIMS almost instantly identifies the chemicals present in human tissue by analyzing the smoke that is released during electrosurgery.

Cells produce thousands of metabolites in various concentrations, depeding on their cell type. So once the REIMS technology is primed with the profiles of healthy and cancerous cells, it can rapidly use these to screen the sample of smoke and inform the surgeon whether it is from a tumor or healthy tissue.

Results delivered in under 3 seconds

By comparing the chemical profile of the tissue it is sampling to the reference library, the iKnife can deliver a result in under 3 seconds, say the researchers.

But for this study, the surgeons carrying out the procedures were not allowed to see the nearly instant readings from the iKnife.

The researchers now hope to run a clinical trial that tests whether giving surgeons access to iKnife readings during operations improves outcomes for patients.

Dr. Takats says in a statement:

"These results provide compelling evidence that the iKnife can be applied in a wide range of cancer surgery procedures."

As the technology delivers almost instant results, it allows "surgeons to carry out procedures with a level of accuracy that hasn't been possible before", he adds, noting that they "believe it has the potential to reduce tumor recurrence rates and enable more patients to survive."

Source: Medical News Today

FDA STRENGTHENS WARNINGS ON TANNING BEDS TO REDUCE CANCER RISK

Tanning beds and sunlamps will be required to carry stronger warning labels under new regulations proposed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is also recommending the machines not be used by people under the age of 18.

The FDA said that it plans to reclassify sunbeds from low-risk to moderate-risk products, meaning they will need to be cleared by the agency before being allowed onto the market.

Faulty equipment has led to patients being burned or exposed to too much radiation, Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA's center for devices and radiological health, said in an interview.

Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Basal cell and squamous cell cancer, the two most common forms, are generally curable; but melanoma, the third most common type, is deadly.

In 2009, the most recent year numbers are available, 61,646 people in the United States were diagnosed with melanoma and 9,199 people died, according to the CDC.

The FDA's proposed regulations stop short of recommendations made by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, which in 2009 concluded that commercial tanning devices were more dangerous than previously thought and recommended people under 18 be banned from using them.

The FDA's regulations also stop short of new rules being developed by some U.S. states.

More than 30 states regulate the use of tanning facilities to differing degrees. Delaware, New Hampshire and North Dakota, for example, ban the use of indoor tanning by anyone under age 14 unless medically necessary and they require parental consent for those between the ages of 14 and 18.

Some states, including Georgia, Illinois and Maine, ban tanning beds for children under the age of 14, and eighteen states require tanning bed operators to limit exposure time to a manufacturers' recommendations and provide eye protection.

In January 2012, California became the first state to ban tanning beds for all people under 18.

The Indoor Tanning Association argues vigorously that the decision on whether a teen is allowed to suntan is one for parents, not government, and it supports parental consent. But it is fighting the growing number of states issuing bans.

"Is the next step to ban teens from sun bathing at public beaches and pools?" the association asked in a statement last year in opposition to New Jersey's proposal to ban tanning bed use for those under 17.

"You also have to consider the health risks associated with banning teenagers from using tanning salons," it said. "They will just go outside with no adult supervision and no trained staff where they are much more likely to get sunburned."

The FDA's actions follow a 2010 meeting of a federal advisory panel which unanimously recommended that the agency reclassify tanning devices. Panelists had mixed views on whether to implement a ban on minors.

An estimated 5.6 percent of U.S. adults reported indoor tanning at least once in 2010, with the highest rates among white, female 18 to 25-year-olds, according to the CDC, which notes that frequent exposure to UV rays for people under the age of 35 increases the risk of developing melanoma by 75 percent.

"For right now our proposal tries to focus on providing better information for consumers," Shuren said, "including a warning on the tanning beds themselves that they shouldn't be used in people under 18," he said.

Depending on the feedback the agency receives to its proposal, it may make changes to the final order, he said.