Helen Jaques

Receiving a diagnosis of prostate cancer is a very stressful and upsetting event, so much so that some men go on to have a fatal heart attack or kill themselves.
Two pieces of research by the same study group, one conducted in 340,000 men in the US and the other in 170,000 men from Sweden, have [...]

A study of nearly 9,000 Australian adults has reported that people who watched 4 hours of TV a day or more were 46% more likely to die within the next six and a half years than those who watched less than 2 hours a day.  Each one hour increase in daily television viewing increased the [...]

Here’s a Friday funny for you: my friend put me onto a hilarious website called “Kill or cure“, which classifies inanimate objects on the basis of whether British newspaper the Daily Mail says they cause cancer or cure it.
Metal, according to the Daily Mail, causes cancer, but nobody panic, iron and zinc prevent it.
Nuts prevent [...]

A new study published in JAMA this week has shown that in patients with colorectal cancer, taking an aspirin a day after diagnosis reduces the risk dying from the cancer or from any cause by at least 20%.  Taking aspirin before diagnosis, however, did not have any effect of prognosis.
It has been known for a [...]

A 62-year-old cancer survivor was recently temporarily denied entry into the US because the treatment he had been receiving had wiped out his fingerprints.
The patient, Mr S, had been taking the chemotherapy drug capecitabine for three years to prevent recurrence of his nasopharyngeal cancer following successful treatment of the disease with another chemotherapy regimen.
Capecitabine can [...]

You’d think people with strong religious beliefs – which generally include belief in an afterlife – would be less perturbed about slipping of this mortal coil than the rest of us.
A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, however, has found that cancer patients who rely on their religion for comfort [...]

Fresh fruit and vegetables can inhibit the growth of breast cancer tumors and reduce the risk of death in women who already have breast cancer, say two new studies.
The first study is one of several on the effects of fresh apple extracts in rats.  Whole apple extracts have strong antiproliferative and antioxidant activities, thought to [...]

Annual screening for prostate cancer may not be required in many elderly men, whereas routine screening for breast cancer should probably never have been implemented, say two separate studies published this week. These studies raise questions as to whether regular screening for common cancers is really necessary and, if so, in which groups.
In the [...]

Researchers in the US have found a new marker of the aggressiveness of prostate cancer that is detectable in the urine of men with the malignancy.  Sreekumar et al. discovered that levels of sarcosine, a common amino acid found in many biological tissues, are higher in invasive prostate cancers than in benign cancers and are [...]

A study of nearly 1,400 adult and pediatric cancer patients published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology has found that 19% of children taking chemotherapy drugs in outpatient clinics or at home were subject to some sort of medication error.  In addition, 7% of adult cancer outpatients also were on the receiving end of chemotherapy [...]