Soft Tissue By N. A. Akamike, $16.00
( a preview of breast cancer)
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Soft Tissue by N. A. Akamike, ISBN #: 978-0-8059-8446-0
Soft Tissue: The Unsolved Mystery, Breast Cancer” is a fictitious story that blends aspects of medical and sociological drama creating a contemporary, thrilling, fast paced and engaging novel.
The story begins with Roxy Adams striking a friendship with Elaine, Ifeoma, and Beatrice during the Chicago’s mayoral election. Their friendship culminated in a vacation to Egypt. Roxy, the daughter of an industrialist father whose wife has a genetic link to cancer, fell in love with James Ugo, a scientist, en route to Egypt. A romantic relationship developed between James and Roxy that continued after the end of the Egyptian vacation. Her relationship with James headed towards marriage. The interests and professional ties of Roxy, an attorney, and her friends provided a forum for an extensive discussion of breast cancer. The scientist and medical doctors elaborated on most aspects of the cancer, possible risk factors, including oral contraceptives and hormone based therapies. When Roxy was suddenly diagnosed with breast cancer, her curiosity about the origin and progress of breast cancer expanded the conversation to include considerations of stem cell research and genetic influences. The diagnosis exposed the fragility of the love between Roxy and James. The emotional turmoil as a result of the diagnosis compounded by potential infidelity by James caused Roxy to have an accident. On the other hand, Denise who suffered a stroke as a consequence of HRT use faced uncertainty in her proposed marriage to her long term fiancé, Charles.
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About the Author: N. A. Akamike is a research scientist in the areas of industrial chemistry and medicinal chemistry, emphasizing in pharmaceutical sciences. He is a recipient of the Sigma Xi Award (excellence in science), the inventor on four patents related to cancer (World Patent, U.S. Patent, European Patent), and the coauthor of eight scientific publications in the area of cancer and HIV/AIDS. Akamike is a staff scientist in drug discovery with major pharmaceutical companies, including Biotechs in the San Francisco Bay area
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San Francisco Chronicle, September 6, 2007
KEY STUDY OF BREAST CANCER IN BLACKS by Marilynn Marchione
“Black women have more breast cancers that are estrogen receptor-negative, or resistant to hormone treatments, than white women do, a study found.”
“In the study, ER-negative tumors were more common in black women at every stage of disease and at all ages.”
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The Wall Street Journal, Monday, September 17, 2007
NEW LIGHT IS SHED ON HORMONE THERAPY by Ron Winslow
[excerpt]
Researchers at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas have discovered that a compound related to cholesterol can block the hormone estrogen from performing functions in blood vessels that keep them healthy and free of disease that can lead to heart attacks.
Much previous researchers found that estrogen benefits the heart, but confidence in that premise was shaken in 2002 when a major Women’s Health Initiative Study of hormone-replacement therapy in postmenopausal women was halted after data indicated the regime increased the risk of coronary disease.
The finding caused an uproar and thousands of women undergoing hormone replacement to alleviate menopausal symptoms stopped taking the medicine.
The culprit identified by the Texas team is a molecule called 27-hydroxycholesterol, or 27HC, a byproduct created as the body processes cholesterol.
Dr. Mangelsdorf says his report offers a reason why women who have high cholesterol and have been in menopause or off hormone therapy for a few years aren’t good candidates to start taking estrogen though he says any decision should be made in consultation with a physician familiar with the science.
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USA TODAY, Tuesday, September 18, 2007
EXERCISE AIDS BLOOD SUGAR LEVELS: The more you do, the more you improve.
By Nanci Hellmich
[Excerpt]
Good news for diabetes: Both aerobic exercise and strength training improve blood sugar levels. And lots of both provides the best results, a new study shows.
About 20.8 million people in the USA have diabetes. Type 2 diabetes – the most common kind – is associated with obesity, lack of exercise and genetics. Diabetes is caused by the body’s failure to produce enough insulin or to use it effectively to reduce blood sugar levels. Overtime, high sugar levels damage large and small blood vessels, leading to heart disease, stroke, nerve damage, amputations, blindness and kidney disease.
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San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, September 27, 2007
BREAST CANCER LINKED TO DRINKING –even a daily glass of wine can raise risk, Kaiser study finds. By Erin Allday (chronicle staff writer)
[Excerpt]
Heavy drinking significantly increases the risk of developing breast cancer – just a glass pr two of wine with dinner every night – can make women more vulnerable to the disease, according to research by Kaiser Permanente doctors in Oakland.
The study of more than 70,000 Kaiser patients, results of which were presented Wednesday at the European Cancer Conference in Spain, showed that women who drink three or more alcoholic beverages a day increased their risk of breast cancer by 30 per cent. Women who drank one or two a day increased their risk by 10 per cent.
The type of alcohol consumed didn’t make a difference.
The study was based on interviews with more than 70,000 women between 1978 and 1985. Nearly 3,000 of those women had been diagnosed with breast cancer by 2004.
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San Francisco Chronicle, Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Studies urge fast treatment of ministrokes - Patients given medication within 24 hours have 80 per cent less risk of big stroke.
by Maria Cheng, Associated Press
[excerpts]
London - Treating patients quickly for ministrokes could dramatically cut the risk of a major stroke later, report two studies that could change standard treatment and potentially save millions of people from stroke's damaging effects.
In a research published today, British and French doctors found that patients treated within 24 hours of having a ministroke cut their chances by 80 per cent of having a more serious stroke in the next three months. Such large reductions in risk are rare, said Dr Peter Rothwell of Oxford University, lead author of study published in the Lancet medical journal. "We normally get excited about 10 to 15 percent."
Worldwide every year, nearly 15 million people have a stroke, and it is one of the leading killers in the industrialized world. Ministrokes or transient Ischemic strokes have the same symptoms as a big stroke, including facial numbness, slurred speech, paralysis on one side of the body, blurry vision or a sudden headache. But in small strokes, the syptoms last less than a day.
Doctors increasingly say that small strokes should be seen as warning signals for a more dangerous stroke later, in the same way that chest pain can be a red flag for an imminent heart attack. "We need to think of transient ischemic strokes as the 'angina' or 'acute coronary syndrome' equivalent for the brain," said Dr. Ralph Sacco, chairman of neurology at the university of Miami, who was not connected to the study....
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INFORMATION RECENTLY PUBLISHED IN YAHOO.COM WEBSITE:
New study firmly ties hormone use to breast cancer
By MARILYNN MARCHIONE, AP Medical Writer Marilynn Marchione, Ap Medical Writer
Sat Dec 13, 5:47 pm ET
SAN ANTONIO – Taking menopause hormones for five years doubles the risk for breast cancer, according to a new analysis of a big federal study that reveals the most dramatic evidence yet of the dangers of these still-popular pills.
Even women who took estrogen and progestin pills for as little as a couple of years had a greater chance of getting cancer. And when they stopped taking them, their odds quickly improved, returning to a normal risk level roughly two years after quitting.
Collectively, these new findings are likely to end any doubt that the risks outweigh the benefits for most women.
It is clear that breast cancer rates plunged in recent years mainly because millions of women quit hormone therapy and fewer newly menopausal women started on it, said the study's leader, Dr. Rowan Chlebowski of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.
"It's an excellent message for women: You can still diminish risk (by quitting), even if you've been on hormones for a long time," said Dr. Claudine Isaacs of Georgetown University's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. "It's not like smoking where you have to wait 10 or 15 years for the risk to come down."
Study results were given Saturday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.
They are from the Women's Health Initiative, which tested estrogen and progestin pills that doctors long believed would prevent heart disease, bone loss and many other problems in women after menopause. The main part of the study was stopped in 2002 when researchers saw surprisingly higher risks of heart problems and breast cancer in hormone users.
Since then, experts have debated whether these risks apply to women who start on hormones when they enter menopause, usually in their 50s, and take them for shorter periods of time. Most of the women in the federal study were in their 60s and well past menopause.
So the advice has been to use hormones only if symptoms like hot flashes are severe, and at the lowest dose and shortest time possible. The new study sharpens that message, Chlebowski said.
"It does change the balance" on whether to start on treatment at all, he said.
Even so, most women will not get breast cancer by taking the pills short-term. The increased cancer risk from a couple of years of hormone use translates to a few extra cases of breast cancer a year for every 1,000 women on hormones. This risk accumulates with each year of use, though.
The Women's Health Initiative study had two parts. In one, 16,608 women closely matched for age, weight and other health factors were randomly assigned to take either Wyeth Pharmaceuticals' Prempro — estrogen and progestin — or dummy pills.
This part was halted when researchers saw a 26 percent higher risk of breast cancer in those on Prempro.
But that was an average over the 5 1/2 years women were on the pills. For the new study, researchers tracked 15,387 of these women through July 2005, and plotted breast cancer cases as they occurred over time.
They saw a clear trend: Risk rose with the start of use, peaked when the study ended and fell as nearly all hormone users stopped taking their pills. At the peak, the breast cancer risk for pill takers was twice that of the others.
Think of it as President Bush's public approval rating, said another study leader, Dr. Peter Ravdin of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
"Bush's popularity may be 50 percent on average, but it might have been descending the whole time he was president," Ravdin said.
In the second part of the federal study, researchers observed just 16,121 women who had already been on hormones for an average of seven years and another group of 25,328 women who had never used them. No results on breast cancer risk in these women have been given until now.
Plotting cases over time, researchers saw in retrospect that hormone users had started out with twice the risk of breast cancer as the others, and it fell as use declined. Among those taking hormones at the start of the study, use dropped to 41 percent in 2003, the year after the main results made news.
In the general population, use of hormone products has dropped 70 percent since the study, said another of its leaders, Dr. JoAnn Manson, preventive medicine chief at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
That corresponds with big drops in breast cancer cases, but some scientists have said this could be due to a fall-off in mammograms, which would mean fewer cancers were being detected, not necessarily that fewer were occurring.
The new study puts that theory to rest. Mammography rates were virtually the same among those taking hormones and those not.
"It is clear that changing mammography patterns cannot explain the dramatic reductions in breast cancer risk," Manson said.
"The data are getting stronger," said Dr. C. Kent Osborne, a breast cancer specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Women who do need the pills should not panic, though the doubling of risk — a 100 percent increase — for long-term users is quite worrisome, cancer specialists say. Although the new study does not calculate risks in terms of actual cases, previous research showed that the average increased risk of 26 percent meant a difference of a few extra cases a year for every 1,000 women on hormone pills, compared with nonusers.
"Hormone therapy remains a good health care choice to relieve moderate to severe menopausal symptoms," says a statement from Wyeth, which made the pills used in the study.
"Most women should be able to discontinue hormones in three to four years," or at least reduce their dose, Manson said.
A future analysis will look at other women in the study who took only estrogen, generally women who have had hysterectomies.
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RECENTLY PUBLISHED IN BBC NEWS; Jan 13, 2009
HRT 'can shrink women's brains'
Some forms of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) can slightly shrink the brains of post-menopausal women, a US study has suggested.
The findings may help explain previous work linking HRT to an increased risk of memory loss and dementia.
A team led by researchers at Wake Forest University carried out brain scans on 1,400 women aged 71 to 89 who took part in an earlier HRT trial.
But UK experts said the study, published in Neurology, had flaws.
Significant numbers of women take hormones to reduce the unpleasant symptoms of the menopause, such as hot flushes, mood changes, and thinning of the bones.
However, research has linked HRT to a raised risk of some forms of cancer.
The latest study found two key areas of the brain involved in thinking and memory were smaller in women who had taken HRT than in those who had been given a "dummy" placebo pill.
Brain volume was 2.37 cubic centimetres lower in the frontal lobe and 0.10 cubic centimetres lower in the hippocampus.
Limitations
However, the researchers admit they were unable to carry out brain scans before the women began taking HRT.
And the results suggest shrinkage was most pronounced in women who may already have started to develop memory problems before they started taking hormones.
Lead researcher Dr Susan Resnick, from the US National Institute on Ageing, said: "Our findings suggest that hormone therapy in older post-menopausal women has a negative effect on brain structures important in maintaining normal memory functioning.
"However, this negative effect was most pronounced in women who already may have had some memory problems before using hormone therapy, suggesting that the therapy may have accelerated a neurodegenerative disease process that had already begun."
Older women
Dr David Sturdee, president of the International Menopause Society, said 49% of the women in the study were over 70.
In contrast, women in the UK are typically offered HRT between the ages of 45 and 60.
He said brain shrinkage among women of a relatively advanced age was not a surprising finding.
"The benefits (of HRT) are still way in excess of the risks."
HRT is known to increase the risk of a stroke, and it had been assumed that women's memory might be affected by the build up of damage caused by "silent" strokes.
However, researchers found no evidence of an increase in the volume of such damage among women taking HRT.
The forms of HRT examined in the latest study contain a variety of oestrogens referred to as conjugated equine oestrogens.
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BBC News: May 22, 2008
Excerpts:
HRT pills 'blood clot risk link'
Menopausal women who use oral hormone replacement therapy (HRT) more than double their risk of blood clots, French scientists say.
But using skin patches to deliver oestrogen does not increase risk, they report in the British Medical Journal.
HRT has previously been linked to blood clots, but this is first systematic review of the risk involved.
But experts said the overall risk was relatively small and more research was needed to confirm patches are safer.
HRT is regularly prescribed to women suffering from the effects of the menopause.
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December 2010.
Elizabeth Edwards wife of presidential candidate John Edwards dies of cancer.
Elizabeth Edwards Got Revenge on Cheating John Edwards!
ELIZABETH Edwards got the ultimate revenge before she died — by telling her cheating husband that she’ll never forgive him. And Elizabeth — who died earlier this month after losing her lengthy battle with cancer — told John Edwards that she made amendments to her will to cut him off from part of their $53 million
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