Word: cancerous
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...Catherine Deneuve) convene their three grown children (Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric, Melvil Poupaud) and their kids for the sort of holiday games you'll find in many family reunions: musical beds, generational scores-settling and the ripping off of psychic scabs. Amid all the melodrama - Junon has liver cancer and needs a bone-marrow transplant from someone of her blood - the conversation is bantering, often affectionate. In this chatty 2-1/2hr. film, Desplechin (Kings and Queen) seems to be going for the old French New Wave recipe of emotional warmth and cinematic wizardry. But the souffl? doesn't quite...
...patients. Their study showed that for the sickest patients, the average cost of an additional quality-of-life year was much higher - $488,000. "It is difficult to justify the burden and expense of dialysis when persons have other serious health conditions such as, for example, advanced dementia or cancer," says co-author Glenn Chertow, a nephrology professor at the Stanford School of Medicine. "In these settings, dialysis is unlikely to provide any meaningful benefit." But with organs including kidneys for transplant so scarce, is it justifiable to deny these patients a chance to live through dialysis...
...chemotherapy agents that Kennedy and his doctors will most likely consider are Temodar, an oral drug, and Gliadel, a wafer embedded with a cancer-killing drug that surgeons place in the brain after the tumor is removed. The wafer dissolves over a period of two weeks and, if successful, destroys any remaining cancer cells in its wake. Radiation therapy for glioma usually begins two weeks following surgery, and lasts for about six weeks, says Dr. Henry Brem, director of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, who helped develop Gliadel and is not involved in Kennedy's treatment...
Treatment of glioma can be difficult, say researchers, because they still don't know what causes the disease. The cancer arises from glial cells, which outnumber neurons 10 to 1, and whose function is to support the electrical activity of neurons in the brain - but doctors don't know what pushes normal glial cells to become cancerous in the first place. "We know very little about the biology of malignant glioma," says Dr. Azad Bonni, a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School who is investigating some of the molecular explanations behind the disease...
Depending on where the senator's tumor is located, Kennedy could expect to return to near-normal functioning. If the lesion is in a location where surgeons can remove it easily, then he has a good chance of controlling the cancer with additional chemotherapy and radiation. "I have patients 20 and 30 years out from diagnosis, and they are functioning normally and doing well," says Brem. "We hope that Senator Kennedy becomes one of them...