Eventhough a growing body of research supports a link between effective communication and patient, family and doctor satisfaction, doctors, including oncologists and other specialists who frequently care for terminal patients, do not routinely receive training in end-of-life conversations during medical school, residency training, or after they start to practice medicine........

A new University of Michigan study in mice suggests that a drug recently approved to fight cancer tumors is also able to reduce the effects of graft-versus-host disease, a common and sometimes fatal complication for people who have had bone marrow transplants. Plans are under way at U-M for an initial trial of the drug in people as a new way to prevent graft-versus-host disease. Scientists expect to begin a trial within a year........

The other day, news broke out that doctors found malignant brain tumor in Senator Edward .........

Toronto, ON. Just weeks before Ontario implements a ban on the retail display of all tobacco products, new research from the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit at the University of Toronto shows that consumers have been bombarded by extensive tobacco promotion at point of sale. Places where tobacco is sold have become important environments for the tobacco industry to communicate with current, former and potential smokers through large tobacco product displays, countertop displays and signs advertising tobacco........

A study based at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston provides added justification that a thiazide-type diuretic is the best first-choice drug for hypertensive patients. The findings, reported in the American Heart Associations Circulation, Volume 117, Issue 20, evaluate the results of a prior trial coordinated by scientists at The University of Texas School of Public Health, along with other recent studies........

Eventhough letters representing the three billion pairs of molecules that form the "rungs" of the helical DNA "ladder" are routinely called the human "genetic code," the DNA they comprise transmits traits across generations in a variety of ways, not all of which depend on the sequence of letters in the code........

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have identified, characterized and cloned ovarian cancer stem cells and have shown that these stem cells may be the source of ovarian cancers recurrence and its resistance to chemotherapy. These results bring us closer to more effective and targeted treatment for epithelial ovarian cancer, one of the most lethal forms of cancer, said Gil Mor, M.D., associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at Yale School of Medicine........

The use of MRI without endorectal coil can detect prostate cancer and provide undistorted images with diagnostic image quality and accurate tumor localization, as per a recent study conducted by scientists from The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH. The 3T MRI datasets were acquired without an endorectal coil and were used during robotic surgery, said Steffen Sammet, MD, PhD, lead author of the study. Since the use of an endorectal coil leads to deformation of the prostate and potentially altered microcirculation, our goal was to assess the capability of detecting prostate cancer areas by dynamic contrast enhanced MRI without endorectal coil at 3T validated by correlation with surgical pathology, he said........

An increased cancer risk in post-menopausal women after they stopped taking combined hormone treatment was an unexpected finding in a study that will be published in the March 5 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), said Rowan T. Chlebowski, M.D., Ph.D., a Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed) lead investigator who contributed to the study........

Cases of esophageal cancer (adenocarcinoma) in the U.S. have risen in recent decades from 300,000 cases in 1973 to 2.1 million in 2001 at age-adjusted rates. A new study published in The American Journal of Gastroenterology shows that these rates in the U.S. closely mirrored trends of increased carbohydrate intake and obesity from 1973-2001........

The immune system's powerful cellular mutation and repair processes appear to offer important clues as to how lymphatic cancer develops, Yale School of Medicine scientists report this week in Nature. "The implications of these findings are considerable," said David Schatz, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, professor of immunobiology at Yale, and senior author of the study. "It now seems likely that anything that compromises the function of these DNA repair processes could lead to widespread mutations and an increased risk of cancer"........

If the genome is the parts list of the human cell, certain proteins are the production managers, activating and deactivating genes as needed. Researchers funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), part of the National Institutes of Health, now have a clearer understanding of how a key protein controls gene activity and how mutations in the protein may cause disease. The work could provide new avenues to design drugs aimed at cancer, diabetes, HIV, and heart disease........

Men with susceptibility for prostate cancer will soon be identifiable through a simple DNA test. So hope researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet, who have shown that men carrying a combination of known risk genes run a four to five times higher risk of developing prostate cancer........

A high-energy form of ultrasound imaging developed by scientists at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering produces pictures of liver tumors that are better than those made with traditional ultrasound, as per results of a clinical study. The study suggests that the imaging method known as Acoustic Radiation Force Impulse (ARFI) ultrasound might offer a new tool for screening patients at increased risk for liver cancers, as per the researchers. They say it might also play a useful role in guiding biopsy procedures and minimally invasive therapies aimed at destroying malignant tissues found deep in the abdomen........

Another FDA-approved targeted cancer drug, sunitinib (SutentTM, Pfizer), may be linked to cardiac toxicity, report scientists at Childrens Hospital Boston, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Boston), and Thomas Jefferson University (Philadelphia). Their collaborative study, led by Ming Hui Chen, MD, MMSc, a heart specialist at Childrens who specializes in the cardiac health of cancer patients, appears in the December 15 issue of The Lancet, accompanied by an editorial........

A new drug for chronic myelogenous leukemia works for patients who have developed resistance to frontline treatment and causes fewer side effects than other medications in its class, a research team led by researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center reports at the 49th annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology........

Results from two genome-wide association studies have identified a genetic variant of the DAB2IP gene that is linked to the risk of aggressive prostate cancer. Research teams from the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), Wake Forest University School of Medicine, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions made the discovery jointly........

Depression is known to be linked to cancer yet too a number of cancer patients are not screened for this mental disorder, as per scientists from the Indiana University School of Medicine, the Regenstrief Institute and the Roudebush VA Medical Center. As per a research findings reported in the November-recent issue of General Hospital Psychiatry, Caroline Carney Doebbeling, M.D., M.Sc. and Laura Jones, Ph.D., looked at data from the Roudebush VA Medical Center, where 95 percent of veterans in primary care are screened for depression........