Do Cleaning Products & Sprays

Cause Breast Cancer?

Science (July 21, 2010) — Women who report greater use of cleaning products may be at higher breast cancer risk than those who say they use them sparingly. Researchers writing in BioMed Central’s open access journal Environmental Health asked more than 1500 women about their cleaning product usage and found that women who reported using more air fresheners and products for mold and mildew control had a higher incidence of breast cancer.

Julia Brody, from the Silent Spring Institute, USA, worked with a team of researchers to carry out telephone interviews with 787 women diagnosed with breast cancer and 721 comparison women. She said, “Women who reported the highest combined cleaning product use had a doubled risk of breast cancer compared to those with the lowest reported use. Use of air fresheners and products for mold and mildew control were associated with increased risk. To our knowledge, this is the first published report on cleaning product use and risk of breast cancer.”

The researchers questioned women on product use, beliefs about breast cancer causes, and established and suspected risk factors. They found that cleaning products, air fresheners, and insect repellents were associated with breast cancer, but little association was observed with overall pesticide use. Women with breast cancer who believed that chemicals and pollutants contribute ‘a lot’ to the risk of developing the condition were more likely to report high product usage.

Speaking about this potential bias to the study, Brody said, “When women are diagnosed with breast cancer, they often think about what happened in the past that might have contributed to the disease. As a result, it may be that women with breast cancer more accurately recall their past product use or even over-estimate it. Or, it could also be that experience with breast cancer influences beliefs about its causes. For example, women diagnosed with breast cancer are less likely to believe heredity contributes ‘a lot’, because most are the first in their family to get the disease.”

In order to avoid possible recall bias, the researchers recommend further study of cleaning products and breast cancer using prospective self-reports and measurements in environmental and biological media.

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Of Bugs and Brains:

Gut Bacteria Affect Multiple Sclerosis

Science (July 20, 2010) — Biologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have demonstrated a connection between multiple sclerosis (MS) — an autoimmune disorder that affects the brain and spinal cord — and gut bacteria.

The work — led by Sarkis K. Mazmanian, an assistant professor of biology at Caltech, and postdoctoral scholar Yun Kyung Lee — appears online the week of July 19-23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Multiple sclerosis results from the progressive deterioration of the protective fatty myelin sheath surrounding nerve cells. The loss of myelin hinders nerve cells from communicating with one another, leading to a host of neurological symptoms including loss of sensation, muscle spasms and weakness, fatigue, and pain. Multiple sclerosis is estimated to affect about half a million people in the United States alone, with rates of diagnosis rapidly increasing. There is currently no cure for MS.

Although the cause of MS is unknown, microorganisms seem to play some sort of role. “In the literature from clinical studies, there are papers showing that microbes affect MS,” Mazmanian says. “For example, the disease gets worse after viral infections, and bacterial infections cause an increase in MS symptoms.”

On the other hand, he concedes, “it seems counterintuitive that a microbe would be involved in a disease of the central nervous system, because these are sterile tissues.”

And yet, as Mazmanian found when he began examining the multiple sclerosis literature, the suggestion of a link between bacteria and the disease is more than anecdotal. Notably, back in 1993, Caltech biochemist Leroy Hood — who was then at the University of Washington — published a paper describing a genetically engineered strain of mouse that developed a lab-induced form of multiple sclerosis known as experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, or EAE.

When Hood’s animals were housed at Caltech, they developed the disease. But, oddly, when the mice were shipped to a cleaner biotech facility — where their resident gut bacterial populations were reduced — they didn’t get sick. The question was, why? At the time, Mazmanian says, “the authors speculated that some environmental component was modulating MS in these animals.” Just what that environmental component was, however, remained a mystery for almost two decades.

But Mazmanian — whose laboratory examines the relationships between gut microbes, both harmful and helpful, and the immune systems of their mammalian hosts — had a hunch that intestinal bacteria were the key. “As we gained an appreciation for how profoundly the gut microbiota can affect the immune system, we decided to ask if symbiotic bacteria are the missing variable in these mice with MS,” he says.

To find out, Mazmanian and his colleagues tried to induce MS in animals that were completely devoid of the microbes that normally inhabit the digestive system. “Lo and behold, these sterile animals did not get sick,” he says.

Then the researchers decided to see what would happen if bacteria were reintroduced to the germ-free mice. But not just any bacteria. They inoculated mice with one specific organism, an unculturable bug from a group known as segmented filamentous bacteria. In prior studies, these bacteria had been shown to lead to intestinal inflammation and, more intriguingly, to induce in the gut the appearance of a particular immune-system cell known as Th17. Th17 cells are a type of T helper cell — cells that help activate and direct other immune system cells. Furthermore, Th17 cells induce the inflammatory cascade that leads to multiple sclerosis in animals.

“The question was, if this organism is inducing Th17 cells in the gut, will it be able to do so in the brain and central nervous system?” Mazmanian says. “Furthermore, with that one organism, can we restore to sterile animals the entire inflammatory response normally seen in animals with hundreds of species of gut bacteria?”

The answer? Yes on all counts. Giving the formerly germ-free mice a dose of one species of segmented filamentous bacteria induced Th17 not only in the gut but in the central nervous system and brain — and caused the formerly healthy mice to become ill with MS-like symptoms.

“It definitely shows that gut microbes have a strong role in MS, because the genetics of the animals were the same. In fact, everything was the same except for the presence of those otherwise benign bacteria, which are clearly playing a role in shaping the immune system,” Mazmanian says. “This study shows for the first time that specific intestinal bacteria have a significant role in affecting the nervous system during MS — and they do so from the gut, an anatomical location very, very far from the brain.”

Mazmanian and his colleagues don’t, however, suggest that gut bacteria are the direct cause of multiple sclerosis, which is known to be genetically linked. Rather, the bacteria may be helping to shape the immune system’s inflammatory response, thus creating conditions that could allow the disease to develop. Indeed, multiple sclerosis also has a strong environmental component; identical twins, who possess the same genome and share all of their genes, only have a 25 percent chance of sharing the disease. “We would like to suggest that gut bacteria may be the missing environmental component,” he says.

For their part, Th17 cells are needed for the immune system to properly combat infection. Problems only arise when the cells are activated in the absence of infection — just as disease can arise, Mazmanian and others suspect, when the species composition of gut bacteria become imbalanced, say, by changes in diet, because of improved hygiene (which kills off the beneficial bacteria as well as the dangerous ones), or because of stress or antibiotic use. One impact of the dysregulation of normal gut bacterial populations — a phenomenon dubbed “dysbiosis” — may be the rising rate of multiple sclerosis seen in recent years in more hygienic societies.

“As we live cleaner, we’re not just changing our exposure to infectious agents, but we’re changing our relationship with the entire microbial world, both around and inside us, and we may be altering the balance between pro- and anti-inflammatory bacteria,” leading to diseases like MS, Mazmanian says. “Perhaps treatments for diseases such as multiple sclerosis may someday include probiotic bacteria that can restore normal immune function in the gut… and the brain.”

The work was supported by funding from the California Institute of Technology, the Weston Havens Foundation, and the Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr. Foundation.

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Sexually Transmitted Diseases

The Cancer-Causing Sex Virus

Matthew Herper, 07.21.10, 04:15 PM EDT

HPV–known for causing cervical cancer–is

emerging as the leading cause of throat cancer in

men. Should they get the vaccine too?

Nine Things You Need To Know About HPV

Martin Duffy, a Boston consultant and economist, thought he just had a sore throat. When it persisted for months, he went to the doctor and learned there was a tumor on his tonsils.

Duffy, now 70, had none of the traditional risk factors for throat cancer. He doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink and has run 40 Boston marathons. Instead, his cancer was caused by the human papilloma virus (HPV), which is sexually transmitted and a common cause of throat and mouth cancer.

HPV tumors have a better prognosis than those caused by too many years of booze and cigarettes. But Duffy “is in the unlucky 20%” whose cancer comes back–despite rounds of chemotherapy and radiation that melted 20 more pounds off a lean 150-pound frame. Now the cancer has spread throughout his throat, making eating and talking difficult. “I made my living as a public speaker,” he says. “Now I sound like Daffy Duck.” Duffy believes he has only a few months left. “How do you tell the people you love you love them?” he asks.

Nine Things You Need To Know About HPV

//

Most strains of the HPV virus are harmless, but persistent infections with two HPV strains cause 70% of the 12,000 cases of cervical cancers diagnosed annually in the U.S. Other forms of the sexually transmitted virus can cause penile and anal cancer, and genital warts. The HPV throat cancer connection has emerged in just the last few years and is so new that the government doesn’t track its incidence. Researchers believe it is transmitted via oral sex. But top researchers estimate that there are 11,300 HPV throat cancers each year in the U.S.–and the numbers are growing fast as people have been having more sexual partners since the 1960s. By 2015 there could be 20,000 cases. For more surprising discoveries about HPV, read here.

These big numbers have some top researchers arguing that drug makers should test whether HPV vaccines now used to prevent cervical cancer in women can also prevent throat infections in boys. Two vaccines, Gardasil from Merck ( MRK – news – people ) and Cervarix from GlaxoSmithKline ( GSK – news – people ), are approved for preventing cervical cancer. Gardasil is approved for use in boys only to prevent genital warts.

// Vaccinating boys could stop this meteoric increase in throat cancer. “Clearly, boys need to be vaccinated,” says Marshall Posner, the incoming medical director of head and neck cancer at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York. “I want my kids to be vaccinated. I don’t see a downside to these vaccines.”

There’s only one problem: The vaccine manufacturers aren’t terribly hot on the idea. GlaxoSmithKline says it has no plans to study throat cancer. It adds that it is “committed to providing a vaccine specifically designed to protect against cervical cancer in girls and young women.”

Merck, the maker of Gardasil, seemed more interested a couple of years ago. In 2008 it funded Maura Gillison, the Ohio State University researcher who established the HPV-throat-cancer link in 2000, to do a pilot study to show that test could reliably detect HPV infection in the throat. The pilot study was successful. By early 2009 Gillison says that a larger study of the vaccine in throat cancer looked close to being green lit.

But after Merck agreed to buy rival Schering-Plough ( SGP – news – people ) for $41 billion in March 2009, interest in a big study seemed to evaporate, Gillison says. In a statement, Merck says that “due to competing research and business priorities, we decided not to move ahead with an efficacy study at this time.”

The drug makers’ reticence probably stems from a fear that a throat-cancer vaccine would be hard to get approved. Papilloma viruses usually cause cancer slowly, causing pre-cancerous lesions that take many years to blossom into full-fledged malignant tumors. Papilloma viruses cause the horn-like growths in rabbits that probably gave rise to myths of “jackalopes” in the American West. In the cervix, early abnormal growths can be picked up with a diagnostic test, the Pap smear. Clinical trials of Gardasil and Cervarix took advantage of this, measuring the number of pre-cancerous growths prevented by the vaccines.

But there are no easy-to-detect pre-cancers in the throat. Adolescent boys would have to be followed for decades to to see if the vaccine prevented throat cancer, an unlikely scenario. Short of this, studies could only look at the prevention of HPV throat infections, not cancer or cancer precursors directly. Approving a vaccine for wide use based on this type of short-term data would require a leap of faith that the Food and Drug Administration might not be willing to take.

Top researchers say the federal government needs to step in and fund the long study if drug companies cannot be persuaded to do it themselves. “I’m sorry Merck decided not to do it,” says Posner. “But in the end, this is a federal responsibility. It’s a public health issue.”

For his part, Martin Duffy thinks that drug companies’ complacent attitude toward throat cancer would be different if more of their employees were in his situation. “It will change real fast,” he says, “if one of their executives comes down with this disease.”

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

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Revealing  Health News from Medicine’s Most Notorious Myth-Buster

5 Vaccinations You Should Never Get

Pharmaceutical companies haven’t been shy about sticking generations of Americans with round after round of vaccines to prevent even obscure illnesses. Trust me, kids have a better chance of tap dancing on the moon with Elvis than dying from rubella.
Of course, Big Pharma has decided not to limit their junk vaccines to the children’s market.
Over the past several years in particular, drug companies have aggressively marketed vaccines for adults, using scare tactics to get otherwise sane people to roll up their sleeves in droves. Many of these vaccines are useless, and some are downright dangerous. These five vaccinations are theworst of the worst.
1. Human Papillomavirus (HPV)––Gardasil

One of the biggest designer vaccinations that Big Pharma is shoving down our throats thesedays is the HPV vaccine, Gardasil. This vaccine is needless and, history has shown, dangerous.
Yet women are paying $360 a pop to be injected with it.
The most frustrating part of this whole sham is that Gardasil’s manufacturer, Merck, has drawn on the aid of cancer––medicine’s greatest boogeyman––in order to sell its product. Merck would have us believe that by inoculating against HPV, we’ll stop cervical cancer, at which point Gardasil becomes the “cure for cancer.” This is such a load of bull that we’re going to need a backhoe todig our way out.
According to FDA reports made public through the Freedom of Information Act (that means the government wasn’t volunteering this information, by the way), Gardasil has been linked with a variety of dangerous and even deadly side effects.1 Just since September 2007, the vaccine has been linked to 10 deaths from blood clotting, arrhythmia, and at least one allergic reaction. The vaccine has further been linked to 10 spontaneous abortions and six instances of Guillain-BarreSyndrome, a disease that causes the immune system to attack the nervous system, and which maylead to paralysis.
The FDA report further included evidence of nearly 150 instances of serious injury that resultedfrom the vaccine, and a multitude of outbreaks of warts on the genitals, face, hands, and feet. Thesewarts are most likely caused by the HPV virus and are a condition that should have been avoided through the use of the vaccine.
And while these side effects certainly haven’t affected every patient, the effects are so serious that no sane person should want to subject themselves or their children to this injection. This isespecially true when prevention is as simple as keeping your pants on.
You see, the “dirty” little secret about HPV is that it’s a sexually transmitted disease. Want to avoid HPV?

Skip the shot and get some condoms.

2. Shingles––Zostavax

Another useless vaccine with a major corporate push is the shingles vaccine Zostavax. The only reason more people don’t get it is that many insurance companies won’t cover it. You know why? It costs up to $200 per shot, and it’s an unnecessary preventative for a disease that is completely treatable and not very serious.
My recommendation is that you boost your immune system with zinc and vitamins C and E, then hang around with some kids in your family when they have the chicken pox (more on that later).
Merck––which manufactures Zostavax and also brought us Gardasil––has no clue about the long-term effects of the vaccine. The study on long-term effects conducted for FDA approval only lasted 42 days, so there is no real data on negative consequences of Zostavax over periods of several years. If you take the vaccine, understand you’ll be signing yourself up as a guinea pig in a human drug trial.
The irony here is that the whole shingles “scare” is probably the result of over-fanatical efforts by drug companies to vaccinate children against chicken pox. At least one study has shown that repeated exposure to children with chicken pox increases the immune system’s resistance to shingles.2 Essentially what this means is that by helping our youngsters suffer through their chicken pox, we were building our immunity to shingles.When kids stop getting chicken pox, we start getting shingles.
So, in a sense, Zostavax is a drug-company cure (and a very unproven one at that) for a problem caused by the drug companies.

3. Influenza

Yearly flu shots have become standard operating procedure for people of all ages. The CDC practically mandates an annual inoculation for children aged 6 months to 19 years, adults over 50,and even pregnant women. Each fall, when the colder weather forces us to huddle together for warmth,the CDC passes the warning that your family, friends, and colleagues are all little more than flu incubators. Millions rush to their doctors, hospitals or clinics to get their shots.
But here’s the big news: the flu vaccine doesn’t work.Year to year, the makers of the flu vaccine make a guess about which flu strains will be the most prevalent and then mix them accordingly.
There is currently no system in place to track the effectiveness of the vaccine and to use this data to compile the next flu vaccine. The process is arbitrary enough that they might as well stick some sugar water in a syringe and cross their fingers.
For the elderly and the very young in particular, I can’t recommend exposing potentially weak immune systems to the flu for no net gain.
As always, I recommend building a more powerful immune system with safe natural methods and staying away from jab-happy MDs when the cold months are upon us.
4. Whooping cough

Lately, the mainstream media has been harping on individual cases of pertussis, or whooping cough, as if a global pandemic is waiting around the corner. Big Pharma has their lapdogs pushing out statistics that reveal hundreds of thousands of deaths from whooping cough each year.

The truth is, this is a global statistic that is accounted for by the prevalence of the disease in third world countries without the medical resources to cure a cold, let alone whooping cough. There are only a handful of deaths attributed to this disease in the United States each year, and most of those are infants––some of whom are too young to get the vaccine.
So why is the CDC now pushing for every person to be immunized in infancy and then receive five more booster vaccinations as they advance into adulthood and old age? You have almost no chance of getting whooping cough as an infant, and you have even less chance as an adult. At $60 per booster plus the initial cost of childhood vaccination, the CDC wants us to spend $300 over the course of our lifetimes on a useless vaccine.
We are not living in the barely tamed wilderness of yesteryear.We are living in a modern society with appropriate sanitation, better nutrition, and access to health care that limits the spread of disease and treats diseases like whooping cough with ease. In the modern age, unless you plan on traveling to the third world, there is no need to go injecting yourself with a “weakened” strain of a disease that you may never encounter, and can be easily cured of if you do happen to get it.

5. Measles, Mumps, Rubella, & Chicken pox––ProQuad

Now that I’ve taken time to tell you about the dangers of some of Big Pharma’s adult vaccines,
I am going to sound the alarm for the little ones in your family. If the CDC and pharmaceutical companies have their way, every child born in the United States will get jabbed with enough needles to leave them looking like a voodoo doll; and all this before their second birthdays. The ProQuad vaccine is a cocktail of vaccines that includes the traditional measles, mumps, and rubella, plus a dose of chicken pox that is five times what a child would get in a regular vaccination.
Time has shown that toddlers given the ProQuad injection were twice as likely to have a seizure as toddlers who received MMR and chicken pox vaccinations separately. The seizure data has even caused a government advisory panel on vaccines to step back from recommending ProQuad as their method of choice.
These new horrors only add fuel to the fire that should burn down the vaccination regime. This dangerous all-in-one is a prime example of how impersonal assembly line medicine is doing more harm than good.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

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Daily Drinking

Rather Than Binge Drinking

Is Biggest Risk Factor

In Serious Liver Disease,

New Study Finds

Science(Mar. 20, 2009) — Long-term daily drinking, rather than weekly binge drinking, is by far the biggest risk factor in serious liver disease, according to a new report from the University of Southampton.

The study, published in the journal Addiction this week, concludes that increases in UK liver deaths are a result of daily or near daily heavy drinking, not episodic or binge drinking, and this regular drinking pattern is often discernable at an early age. It also recommends that several alcohol-free days a week is a healthier drinking pattern.

In the study of drinking patterns, dependency and lifetime drinking history in 234 subjects with liver disease, 106 had ALD (Alcohol-related Liver Disease) – 80 of whom had evidence of cirrhosis or progressive fibrosis – the team found that 71 per cent of ALD patients drank on a daily basis.

In contrast to the patients with alcohol-related cirrhosis or fibrosis, patients with other forms of liver disease tended to drink sparingly with only 10 subjects (8 per cent) drinking moderately on four or more days each week.

The study also explored lifetime drinking histories of 105 subjects and found that ALD patients started drinking at a significantly younger age (on average at 15 years old) than other subjects and had significantly more drinking days and units than non-ALD patients from the age of 20 onwards.

Lead author of the study Dr Nick Sheron, consultant hepatologist and senior lecturer at the University of Southampton, comments: “If we are to turn the tide of liver deaths, then along with an overall reduction in alcohol consumption – which means tackling cheap booze and unregulated marketing – we need to find a way to identify those people who are most likely to develop alcohol-related illnesses at a much earlier stage, and perhaps we need to pay as much attention to the frequency of drinking occasions as we do to binge drinking.

“The transition from a late teenage and early 20′s binge drinking pattern to a more frequent pattern of increased intake may prove to be a useful point of intervention in the future, and the importance of three alcohol-free days each week should receive more prominence.”

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Coffee Drinking Associated

With Lower Risk For

Alcohol-Related Liver Disease

Science (June 13, 2006) — Drinking coffee may be related to a reduced risk of developing the liver disease alcoholic cirrhosis, according to a report in the June 12 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Cirrhosis progressively destroys healthy liver tissue and replaces it with scar tissue. Viruses such as hepatitis C can cause cirrhosis, but long-term, heavy alcohol use is the most common cause of the disease in developed countries, according to background information in the article. Most alcohol drinkers, however, never develop cirrhosis; other factors that may play a role include genetics, diet and nutrition, smoking and the interaction of alcohol with other toxins that damage the liver.

Arthur L. Klatsky, M.D., and colleagues at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program, Oakland, Calif., analyzed data from 125,580 individuals (55,247 men and 70,333 women) who did not report liver disease when they had baseline examinations, between 1978 and 1985. Participants filled out a questionnaire to provide information about how much alcohol, coffee and tea they drank per day during the past year. Some of the individuals also had their blood tested for levels of certain liver enzymes; the enzymes are released into the bloodstream when the liver is diseased or damaged.

By the end of 2001, 330 participants had been diagnosed with cirrhosis, including 199 with alcoholic cirrhosis. For each cup of coffee they drank per day, participants were 22 percent less likely to develop alcoholic cirrhosis. Drinking coffee was also associated with a slight reduction in risk for other types of cirrhosis. Among those who had their blood drawn, liver enzyme levels were higher among individuals who drank more alcohol, indicating liver disease or damage; however, those who drank both alcohol and coffee had lower levels than those who drank alcohol but did not drink coffee, with the strongest link among the heaviest drinkers.

Tea drinking was not related to reduced risk in the study, suggesting that it is not caffeine that is responsible for the relationship between coffee and reduced cirrhosis risk. “Previous reports are disparate with respect to whether the apparently protective coffee ingredient is caffeine; in our opinion this issue is quite unresolved,” the authors write.

The findings do not suggest that physicians prescribe coffee to prevent alcoholic cirrhosis, the authors continue. “Even if coffee is protective, the primary approach to reduction of alcoholic cirrhosis is avoidance or cessation of heavy alcohol drinking,” they conclude. “Assuming causality, the data do suggest that coffee intake may partly explain the variability of cirrhosis risk in alcohol consumers. Basic research about hepatic coffee-ethanol interactions is warranted, but we should keep in mind that coffee might represent only one of a number of potential cirrhosis risk modulators.”

(Arch Intern Med. 2006;166:1190-1195. Available pre-embargo to the media at www.jamamedia.org.)

This study was supported by a grant from the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute. Data collection from 1978 to 1985 was supported by a grant from the Alcoholic Beverage Medical Research Foundation, Baltimore, Md.

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Coffee Consumption Associated

With Reduced Risk of Advanced

Prostate Cancer

ScienceDaily (Dec. 8, 2009) — While it is too early for physicians to start advising their male patients to take up the habit of regular coffee drinking, data presented at the American Association for Cancer Research Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference revealed a strong inverse association between coffee consumption and the risk of lethal and advanced prostate cancers.

“Coffee has effects on insulin and glucose metabolism as well as sex hormone levels, all of which play a role in prostate cancer. It was plausible that there may be an association between coffee and prostate cancer,” said Kathryn M. Wilson, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at the Channing Laboratory, Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health.

In a prospective investigation, Wilson and colleagues found that men who drank the most coffee had a 60 percent lower risk of aggressive prostate cancer than men who did not drink any coffee. This is the first study of its kind to look at both overall risk of prostate cancer and risk of localized, advanced and lethal disease.

“Few studies have looked prospectively at this association, and none have looked at coffee and specific prostate cancer outcomes,” said Wilson. “We specifically looked at different types of prostate cancer, such as advanced vs. localized cancers or high-grade vs. low-grade cancers.”

Caffeine is actually not the key factor in this association, according to Wilson. The researchers are unsure which components of the beverage are most important, as coffee contains many biologically active compounds like antioxidants and minerals.

Using the Health Professionals’ Follow-Up Study, the researchers documented the regular and decaffeinated coffee intake of nearly 50,000 men every four years from 1986 to 2006; 4,975 of these men developed prostate cancer over that time. They also examined the cross-sectional association between coffee consumption and levels of circulating hormones in blood samples collected from a subset of men in the cohort.

“Very few lifestyle factors have been consistently associated with prostate cancer risk, especially with risk of aggressive disease, so it would be very exciting if this association is confirmed in other studies,” said Wilson. “Our results do suggest there is no reason to stop drinking coffee out of any concern about prostate cancer.”

This association might also help understand the biology of prostate cancer and possible chemoprevention measures.

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FDA OKs advanced prostate cancer therapy

WASHINGTON (UPI) — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced approval Thursday of a new therapy for certain men suffering advanced prostate cancer.

The FDA said the drug, Provenge (sipuleucel-T), allows patients to use their own immune system to fight the disease. The drug is indicated for the treatment of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of the body and is resistant to standard hormone treatment.

“The availability of Provenge provides a new treatment option for men with advanced prostate cancer, who currently have limited effective therapies available,” said Dr. Karen Midthun, acting director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.

Provenge is an autologous cellular immunotherapy, designed to stimulate a patient’s own immune system to respond against the cancer. Each dose of Provenge is manufactured by obtaining a patient’s immune cells from the blood, the FDA said. The immune cells are then exposed to a protein that is found in most prostate cancers, linked to an immune stimulating substance. After that process, the patient’s own cells are returned to the patient to treat the prostate cancer.

Provenge, administered intravenously in a three-dose schedule given at about two-week intervals, is manufactured by the Dendreon Corp. in Seattle.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 8th June 2010

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Surprise: A Pfizer Cancer Drug Works

Robert LangrethBio | Email
Robert Langreth is a senior editor at Forbes, in charge of health care coverage

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Associated Press

Drug boosts survival

in major skin cancer study

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