Word: cancer
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...with prostate cancer, surgery may offer a better chance for survival than other standard treatments, such as watchful waiting, radiation or hormone therapy, a new study suggests. The survival benefits of surgery, the study found, may be most profound over the long term and in men who are diagnosed with cancer at a relatively young...
...study, published in the Oct. 8 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers at Geneva University in Switzerland reviewed the medical records of 844 patients diagnosed with localized, early-stage prostate cancer between 1989 and 1998: 158 patients received prostatectomy, or surgical removal of all or part of the walnut-sized prostate gland; 205 underwent radiation, either alone or in conjunction with hormone therapy; 72 got hormone therapy alone; 378 were managed with watchful waiting, which entails monitoring disease progression and pursuing treatment if the condition worsens; and 31 were given other treatment combinations...
Five years after diagnosis, survival rates among the patients were similar, regardless of the kind of treatment they received. But in the long term, after 10 years, the cancer-specific survival rate was significantly higher in the surgery group - 83% - than in patients who received radiation (75%) or watchful waiting (72%). The study's data also suggest that younger patients, under 70, and patients with aggressive cancer tumors - those with so-called Gleason scores of 7 or above - had a more significant survival benefit from surgery than other patients. On average, says Dr. Elisabetta Rapiti, a co-author...
...authors of the current study say theirs is the first to examine long-term survival rates of standard prostate cancer treatments, but warn that the results are not definitive. Because the study was observational - rather than a randomized head-to-head comparison of the treatments - the data could have been biased by other factors, such as personal treatment preferences of patients and doctors and other confounding health problems. "It's a retrospective study. In that era, the patients who were the best candidates for treatment got surgery," says Dr. Patrick Walsh, author of Dr. Patrick Walsh's Guide to Surviving...
...parts, one of which is an introduction designed to provide an understanding of chemistry jargon to those whose last encounter with the subject came before their first high school date. The remaining five sections are broken down further by types of disease, spanning the spectrum from allergy to cancer to brain disease.“Molecules and Medicine” allots exactly one page to each molecule in medicine that it covers, breaking the pattern for occasional explanations of the biological targets on which a given class of drugs work, and providing the all-important context that turns its potentially...