With these discoveries leads us to the knowledge that protecting the immune system in the body and keeping viruses at bay, is important in preventing cancer. Viruses enter the body through everyday activities like eating, breathing and sexual activity. Eating well, exercising and avoiding alcohol and cigarettes are good ways to keep your body’s natural defenses functioning at their best. Staying protected with condoms during sexual intercourse helps protect you from sexually transmitted viruses and diseases. Learning healthy life style habits is the beginning of keeping cancer at bay. Focusing on nutrition, exercise, body weight, keeping toxins out of our bodies and our home environment ,and lowering stress will all help boost the immune system.

Scientists at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said indoor emissions from burning biomass fuel — such as wood, charcoal and dung — as well as emissions from high-temperature frying, could lead to cancer.

The World Health Organization has identified burning solid fuels, such as coal, wood, or dung, as one of the top ten causes of disease in the developing world.  Women and children who are at home most of the day have the highest risk.

Estimates are that about half the world’s population uses wood or coal for cooking and heating, often in poorly ventilated spaces.

“It is therefore of enormous public health importance that we call attention to the health risks of what is daily practice for so many people,” Dr Peter Boyle, of the Lyon-based IARC, said in a statement.

A group of 19 scientists looked at several studies that have been done involving people or lab animals.  They found enough evidence to conclude that “emissions from household combustion of coal are ‘carcinogenic to humans.’

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) findings are published in the December, 2006, issue of The Lancet Oncology.

Obese patients are more likely to have a recurrence of colon cancer than their normal-weight counterparts and face an increased risk of dying from the disease.

While it’s not clear that losing weight would improve their prognosis, Dr. James J. Dignam of the University of Chicago and colleagues note, healthy lifestyle changes would probably have other beneficial effects for obese colon cancer patients.

For patients with stage II or stage III colon cancer, the difference in long-term survival for leaner patients compared to those with a body mass index (BMI) of 35 or greater — which physicians refer to as “very obese” — was comparable to the difference between those who had surgery followed by chemotherapy and those who had only surgery.

The very thin, those with a BMI less than 18.5, were also at increased risk of death, primarily from other cancers, including respiratory cancers possibly connected to smoking, as well as non-cancer causes.

“Given the increasing proportion of Americans with a BMI greater than 35 and the fact that these individuals are over-represented among colon cancer patients, we need to find out why extra weight has such a harmful impact and come up with new ways to counter that,” said study author James Dignam, Ph.D., a biostatistician and assistant professor in the Department of Health Studies at the University of Chicago.

“One first step would be to investigate whether modifying diet and exercise habits for patients after treatment would have a positive impact on colon cancer outcomes,” he said. “Other studies beginning to explore the effect exercise in colon and other cancers have been promising.”

The researchers studied data from 4,288 patients with stage II or stage III colon cancer who enrolled in either of two multi-center clinical trials between July 1989 and February 1994. Both trials, administered by the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project, headquartered at the University of Pittsburgh, compared different regimens of chemotherapy following surgery. Median follow-up from surgery to last contact with patients who were still alive was 11.2 years.

The increased risk among the very obese could be related to the interplay between insulin, insulin-like growth factors and proteins that bind to these growth factors, Dignam and his colleagues suggest.

While more research is needed to determine if obese colon cancer patients will do better if they lose weight, they add, “physicians might use the frequent encounters they have with these patients to counsel them regarding the possibility of modifying this risk with lifestyle changes.”

In any case, the researchers note, helping obese colon cancer patients eat better and become more active will likely have other benefits.

SOURCE: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, November 15, 2006.

A remarkable research finding suggests that Stress hormone Norepinephrin can stimulate cancer tumor cells to produce compounds that can break down of the tissue around the tumor cells and allow the cells to more easily move into the bloodstream. Thereon, they can travel to another location in the body to form additional tumors, this process being termed as metastasis.

The research also suggests the same hormone can also stimulate the tumor cells to release another compound that can aid in the growth of new blood vessels that feed cancer cells, hastening the growth and spread of the disease. The work was reported in the latest issue of the journal Cancer Research. .

“This opens up an entirely new way of looking at stress and cancer that’s different from current interpretations,” explained Ronald Glaser, a professor of molecular virology, immunology and medical genetics, and director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at Ohio State University.

Glaser and Eric Yang, a research scientist in the same institute, focused on the role of these three compounds. Two of them, both matrix metalloproteinases — MMP-2 and MMP-9 — play a role in breaking down the scaffolding that cells attach to in order to maintain their shape. The third compound, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), is important in the growth of new blood vessels into tumor cells.

Earlier work by researcher Anil Sood at the University of Texas had shown that the same stress hormones can stimulate ovarian tumor cells to produce these three compounds.

The key to that discovery was that the two stress hormones – epinephrine and norepinephrine – would bind to places on the surface of ovarian cancer cells, called adrenergic receptors, and stimulate the release OF MMP-2, MMP-9 and VEGF which might then foster cancer growth.

“This suggests a new approach to possibly fight some cancers – the prescribing of beta-blocker-type drugs that would block these receptors and perhaps slow the progression of the disease,” Glaser said.

“Using this approach may not cure this cancer but perhaps we could slow down its growth, making the tumor more sensitive to anti-cancer therapy, and therefore extending the patient’s lifespan and improve their quality of life.”

The new study, published in the American Journal of Medicine, was intended to make up for these shortcomings by comparing 96 men and women with laryngeal cancer to a group of adults without the disease. All participants were matched by age, gender, and ethnicity — three of the most important risk factors for this cancer. Overall, the study found people with GERD — gastroesophageal reflux disease — were twice as likely to develop laryngeal cancer, compared to those without the condition. GERD has long been considered a possible risk factor for this cancer, mostly because GERD is common among people with the cancer. More definitive studies are on the horizon.

GERD, which occurs when the muscle of the bottom of the esophagus fails to close properly, allowing stomach acids to leak into the esophagus, is also linked to esophageal cancer.

WHO study reveals that most common cancer because of which people die is lung cancer followed by stomach, liver, colorectal and esophagus. It also mentions that tobacco use is one and only which is preventable cause for lung cancer. How true! Though a striking feature of the study reveals that avoiding tobacco use and taking a healthy diet and being physically fit actually reduces the threat of developing cancer by 40 percent.
The 10 Cancer Facts as published on the WHO organization’s site are:

‘10 Facts About Cancer’

There are more than 100 types of cancers; any part of the body can be affected.

In 2005, 7.6 million people died of cancer – which accounts for 13 percent of the 58 million deaths worldwide.

More than 70 percent of all cancer deaths occur in developing and emerging economic countries.

Worldwide, the five most common types of cancer that kill men are (in order of frequency): lung, stomach, liver, colorectal and esophagus.

Worldwide, the five most common types of cancer that kill women are (in the order of frequency): breast, lung, stomach, colorectal and cervical.

Tobacco use is the single largest preventable cause of cancer in the world.

One-fifth of all cancers worldwide are caused by a chronic infection, for example human papillomavirus (HPV) causes cervical cancer and the hepatitis B virus (HBV) can lead to liver cancer.

A third of all cancers could be cured through early detection and proper treatment.

Pain relief for patients could be improved if current knowledge about pain management and palliative care were applied.

Forty percent of most cancer cases are preventable by refraining from smoking, having a healthy diet, being more physically active and through the prevention of infections that may lead to cancer.

Richard Smith, a gynecologist at Hammersmith Hospital in London, claimed that he was just two years away from successfully performing the first womb transplant operation.

Smith’s claim was interpreted by the British media as “new hope” for thousands of women unable to have children because they are either infertile or have had hysterectomies.

The August edition of Festival Focus Queensland said that breast cancer might not just be linked to radiation from broadcasting equipment, as ABC journalists have claimed.

Instead, it said lifestyle factors could be involved since male staff at the ABC were not known to have shown signs of leukemia or other cancers.

The newsletter said breast cancer used to be rare except among nuns, who did not have children.

But the trend towards delayed childbirth, the widespread use of the contraceptive pill, the advent of hormone replacement therapy in menopausal women and an explosion in the number of abortions had exposed women to far more of the female hormone estrogen.

“The ‘cluster’ of breast cancer cases among female ABC employees in Toowong may be due to problems in their building, but is more likely to be linked with an increased number of women with risk factors for this illness,” the newsletter said in an editorial.

Festival Focus also quoted Babette Francis, a Melbourne journalist with the Endeavour Forum, which has links to the Festival of Light, as saying career women were risking their health.

Although cadmium, a heavy metal, has been classified as a probable cancer-causing substance by the US Environmental Protection Agency, until now no human studies have investigated its link with breast cancer, Dr. Jane A. McElroy told Reuters Health.

The findings from “animal studies have supported an association, and cadmium has been found in breast tissue,” noted the researcher, from the University of Wisconsin Comprehensive Cancer Center in Madison.

McElroy and her team compared urinary levels of cadmium in 246 breast cancer patients and in 254 age-matched controls. The subjects were contacted by telephone to determine the presence of known breast cancer risk factors.

In the study, reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, women with cadmium levels above a certain cut-off were 2.29-times more likely to have breast cancer than those with lower levels. This held true after accounting for established risk factors.

Exactly how cadmium might cause breast cancer is unclear, but there is evidence that it mimics the effects of estrogen. “It actually competes with estrogen for the alpha receptor site,” McElroy said.

McElroy believes that if the current findings are replicated in a larger study and cadmium’s role is confirmed, it could lead to tighter restrictions on how the heavy metal is disposed of in the environment.

Source : News Target

The Health Ministry has concluded its research report “Black Sea Region Cancer and Cancer Risk Factors”. According to the report there is no direct link between the increased number of cancer cases in Turkey’s Black Sea region and Chernobyl incident. Health Minister Akdag told alcohol and the consumption of high-calorie foods were the main causes of cancer.

73,470 people from over 20,000 houses were interviewed across Turkey. Cancer cases in the Black Sea region showed no greater increases than other regions of the country.

Lung cancer is the most common in the cities where the research was carried out. The ratio of people with cancer to the total number of people interviewed was 1.85 according to the research.

The Chernobyl disaster has been claimed as the reason for the rise in cancer cases in Turkey.

The survey conducted in over 4,000 adults found that 40% thought looking good was the main reason for losing weight, while 32% were aware that it lessened cancer risk.

“This research provides a real insight into the priorities many of us have when it comes to looking after our bodies and the low awareness of the link between obesity and cancer,” said Dr Lesley Walker, director of cancer information at Cancer Research UK. “We know for those who don’t smoke, maintaining a healthy body weight is one of the most important things we can do to reduce our risk of cancer.”

Cancers of bowel, stomach, oesophageal and kidney, womb and breast are being seen in a high number of obese people and experts say this is one of the most preventable causes of cancer.

In the survey, younger people were more image conscious, while older people were aware that losing weight prevented cancer. In the over-65 age group, 67 percent were aware of the cancer risks.

“It is alarming is that so many people are unaware that reducing cancer risk is a benefit of maintaining a healthy body weight. We need to continue raising awareness of the dangers of obesity, and offer information to help people lose those extra pounds,” said Professor Jane Wardle, director of Cancer Research UK’s health behavior. The problem of excess weight can be effectively dealt with, by the practice of yoga, which helps to shed unnecessary fat and keep the body in shape.