Angelina Jolie is making even more headlines than usual as she speaks openly about falling in love with Brad Pitt. She also confirmed that her mother is battling ovarian cancer.

Jolie says in an interview with CNN host Larry King that her 56-year-old mom, Marcheline Bertrand, is doing good and she expects her to win her fight against the disease.

“She has fought for six years and she’s a remarkable woman, she’s very, very strong and her spirit remains unbroken.”

Jolie’s Larry King interview was aired on Monday, December 18.

British scientists have made a significant breakthrough in the treatment of ovarian cancer by discovering a way to reverse the resistance to drugs that denies thousands of women patients each year a chance of survival.

Ovarian Cancer is a common disease and one of the hardest to treat. Around 70 per cent of patients cannot be cured because they develop resistance to the chemotherapy which targets the malignant cells.

Professor Hani Gabra and his team at the Hammersmith Hospital in west London have discovered four major gene pathways that could reverse the resistance. This opens up the prospect of developing a drug to block these pathways and allow the chemotherapy to carry on working. The drugs in question, cisplatin and carboplatin – also known as platinum chemotherapy – are given as injections after surgery.

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According to a new study, if you prefer having onions and garlic in your daily diet, you might have lower odds of certain types of cancers.

After analyzing eight different studies from Switzerland and Italy, researchers found that adults who have the highest intake of onions or garlic in their diet had the lowest risk in certain types of cancer. Among these the main were colon, ovarian and throat cancer.

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According to a new research, a protein tests spots risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer in women. Not all women have mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes for breast and ovarian cancer but still have a strong family history.

Tanja Pejovic, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine, said “We knew that there must have been something else that we could track genetically”

In this study which appeared in the Sept. 15 issue of Cancer Research, ovarian tissues of 22 women were examined by the researchers from the Oregon Health & Science University Cancer Institute. They found that those who had a family history of ovarian cancer but no BRCA mutations had a low level of a protein known as FANCD2, which normally protects DNA and helps repair broken chromosomes. In women with low levels of FANCD2, cells from the ovary were unable to be repaired, putting them at risk of developing cancer-causing mutations.

Tanja Pejovic believes these findings may lead a cancer screening method that uses minimally invasive surgery to remove a few epithelial cells from the ovary for testing. During tests, doctors would look for signs of chromosomal breakage.

“Basically we have discovered that by testing ovarian cells for chromosome breakage, we may be able to identify many more women at risk for ovarian and breast cancer than by using BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation testing. Once this method is fully developed, we will be able to tell a young woman who has a family history of ovarian or breast cancer, but who wants to have children, whether she is at risk or not, without removing her ovary.” says Pejovic.

Recent research indicates that obesity makes ovarian cancer deadlier and more likely to recur. According to physician and senior author of the study, Dr. Andrew J. Li of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, maintaining ideal body weight is important for many reasons. This is just one more reason to reduce obesity — because obese women suffering from advanced ovarian cancer are more likely to die than women at healthy weights. They also suffer recurrences more quickly. On average, women in the study considered overweight or obese saw an average of 16 months before recurrence while those considered underweight or at a healthy weight saw 25 months.

Perhaps it’s the secretion of adipose tissue that makes tumors less sensitive to chemotherapy. Li said there are ideas on the table — and his team are looking into them. One fact they feel certain about is that obesity does not increase the chances of contracting ovarian cancer. It just shows the odds of survival are diminished once the disease has been contracted.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Findings from a new study confirm that obesity is associated with decreased survival among women with ovarian cancer.

“A large study reported last year showed that obesity adversely affects the survival of a number of cancers, including ovarian,” senior author Dr. Andrew J. Li, from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, told Reuters Health.

Li explained that his team wanted to see if this was due to the presence of other concurrent illnesses and conditions, such as diabetes and high blood pressure, or if obesity was having a direct effect on the cancer.

The current study, in the medical journal Cancer, involved 216 patients who underwent surgery for ovarian cancer at the researchers’ institution. Twenty-five percent of patients were considered overweight, having a body mass index of at least 25 but less than 30, while 16 percent were obese, having a BMI of at least 30.

As expected, diabetes and hypertension were more common among obese patients. However, even after accounting for these factors, obese women with advanced ovarian cancer still had worse survival than their counterparts with lower BMIs.

“Based on our findings, we think there is something secreted by fat tissue that affects tumor biology,” Li said. ”

Li said his team is now involved in studies to shed light “on the molecular mechanisms that underlie the association between obesity and ovarian cancer survival.”

Source: Reuters

MONDAY, Aug. 28 — (HealthDay News) — Obese women with ovarian cancer typically fare worse than those who are not obese, a new study shows.

“If women develop ovarian cancer and they are obese, they have a lower chance of survival than those who are overweight or normal weight,” noted senior researcher Dr. Andrew Li, a gynecologic oncologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles.

Obese women with advanced disease may also have a shorter time period to cancer recurrence, according to the study, which will be published in the Oct. 1 issue of Cancer.

Obesity is known to be a risk factor for several malignancies, including endometrial cancer and cancers of the kidney, breast and colon. Previous studies have also found that obesity bodes poorly for survival from ovarian cancer, said Li, who is also assistant professor-in-residence at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.

Li said this study is the first to identify weight as an independent factor in the progression of ovarian cancer and survival. The study also provides a clue as to how obesity boosts the risk of death from ovarian cancer.

“I think fat cells secrete some kind of hormonal factor that actually makes cancer cells behave more aggressively and be less resistant to cell death by traditional chemotherapy drugs,” he explained.

In the study, Li’s team reviewed medical data from 216 women with ovarian cancer to evaluate relationships between obesity, ovarian cancer, the biology of the tumors and health outcomes. The women all had epithelial ovarian cancer, the most common kind, in which tumors originate from the surface cells of the ovary, called epithelial cells. The women had surgery for their cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center between 1996 and 2003.

Eight percent of the patients were underweight, 50 percent were of ideal weight and 26 percent were overweight. Sixteen percent were obese, defined as a body mass index or BMI of 30 or higher.

Li and his team found that women with BMIs more than 25 (the beginning of the “overweight” range) had shorter disease-free survival times than did women with lower BMIs. And, as BMI increased, so did the chances of death from the cancer.

When the researchers evaluated all 216 patents, they did not find that overall survival differed much between the obese and the ideal body weight women. But, when they selected only those with stage III or IV (advanced) disease, a trend emerged. In these women, increased BMI became associated with both shorter time to cancer recurrence and shortened survival, the researchers said.

Li cautioned that, “These findings should certainly be validated in other trials.” However, the study suggests that ovarian cancer survival can now be added to the list of reasons to maintain a healthy body weight, he said.

“This is an interesting paper,” said Dr. Yoshiki Iwamoto, an assistant professor of surgical research at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, Calif. The results, he added, are consistent with what has been reported by others. “Not only ovarian cancer but [other cancers] have been shown to be associated with obesity,” he said.

With more than 30 percent of U.S. adults obese, Iwamoto said, it’s crucial for them to try to lower their weight.

Each year, about 20,000 U.S. women learn they have ovarian cancer, according to statistics from the American Cancer Society, and about 15,000 women die of the disease annually.

A new gene-based technique could help fight killer ovarian cancer, researchers report.

Tiny fatty spheres (liposomes) loaded with genetic material called “short interfering RNA” (siRNA) were able to penetrate deeply into ovarian tumor cells and silence a targeted protein (FAK), say researchers at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston.

FAK (focal adhesion kinase) helps ovarian cancer cells survive, so silencing the protein’s expression led to a significant reduction in tumor size, the Texas team reported.

The research, conducted in mice, demonstrates the effectiveness of using liposomes to deliver siRNA directly into tumor cells. The findings were published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research.

“Short interfering RNA is a great technology we can use to silence genes, shutting down production of harmful proteins. It works well in the lab, but the question has been how to get it into tumors,” study senior author Dr. Anil Sood, associate professor, departments of gynecologic oncology and cancer biology, said in a prepared statement.

While short pieces of RNA can be injected directly into a tumor, the injection methods used in the lab are not practical for treating cancer patients.

Many proteins targeted by cancer drugs are located on the surface of tumor cells. But some, like FAK, are found inside tumor cells.

“Targets like FAK, which are difficult to target with a drug, can be attacked with this liposomal siRNA approach, which penetrates deeply into the tumor,” Sood said.

Mice infected with three human ovarian cancer cell lines were treated for 3 to 5 weeks. Compared to mice that received no treatment, there was a 44 percent to 72 percent reduction in mean tumor weight in mice that received the FAK-silencing liposome.

Tumor reduction was even greater (94 percent to 98 percent) in mice that received the FAK-silencing liposome plus the chemotherapy drug docetaxel.

Source: Forbes

A study of women with ovarian cancer undergoing chemotherapy shows that those with a more optimistic outlook were less distressed and had a better quality of life.

The study team also found that higher levels of optimism at the start of treatment were associated with greater declines in cancer antigen 125 (CA 125) levels during treatment. Declines in CA 125 have been used to predict the likelihood of remission and survival in ovarian cancer patients.

“It is important for health care providers to identify patients who feel less optimistic about life and their cancer and treatment because this population may be vulnerable to distress, diminished quality of life, and suboptimum clinical outcomes,” said Dr. Janet S. de Moor, now at the Ohio State University School of Public Health in Columbus.

“Patients who are less optimistic may benefit from interventions to help them cope with their cancer diagnosis,” she added.

While Dr. de Moor was at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, she and her colleagues assessed levels of optimism, distress, and health-related quality of life, and the change in CA 125 at the start and end of chemotherapy in 90 women with ovarian cancer.

As reported in the July/August issue of Psychosomatic Medicine, the researchers found that women who reported higher optimism about life in general and about their cancer and treatment reported lower anxiety, depression, and perceived stress, as well as better health-related quality of life. They also experienced greater declines in their CA 125 levels during chemotherapy.

“The association between optimism and CA 125 is plausible given other research linking psychosocial variables to tumor-related markers,” Dr. de Moor told Reuters Health. “It should be tested further in future research.”

SOURCE: Psychosomatic Medicine, July/August 2006.

FORCE: Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered is a nonprofit organization for women with increased risk of cancer due to family history and genetic status, and for members and families in which BRCA mutation may be present.

You can find information on risk management, health care, advocacy and also join in on a chat line or message board. There is also a help line to call for those who need support and are concerned about hereditary cancer.

One aspect of the site that I really like is the section for pre-vivors. These individuals have not been diagnosed with cancer but have a predisposition to cancer because of a genetic mutation. This section of the website talks about chemoprevention for breast and ovarian cancer, risk management, family history, genetic counseling and much more.

This is a great resource for those with an increased risk for cancer because they too have to make medical decisions and they face some of the same fears that cancer survivors do.