Word: screenful
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With the new screening test, however, doctors can now potentially spare some patients chemotherapy and exposure to its often toxic side effects. Genomic Health, a biotechnology company, is hoping to launch the test commercially in 2010. The company isn't new to the field of cancer predictors: in 2007 it released the first test of this kind to predict the recurrence of breast cancer. That screen, known as Oncotype Dx, is used widely today and relies on a 21-gene assay to tell patients how likely their cancer is to recur and whether their tumors will respond to chemotherapy...
...latter capability is something the colon-cancer screen doesn't have - yet. But it's something that Dr. Leonard Saltz, a colon-cancer expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, believes is necessary to make the test truly useful for doctors and patients. "What this test clearly does is tell people that you have a greater likelihood of being in the group that is at high risk or low risk of having a recurrence, but it doesn't tell you that your risk will change if you get chemo...
Still, if the screen can stratify patients by the likelihood of their cancer coming back, they might be more comfortable deciding whether to begin chemotherapy. "This is another piece of information that can guide the discussion physicians have with patients about their treatment options," says Dr. Richard Schilsky, president of ASCO and a cancer physician at the University of Chicago. And any such landmarks in that conversation are certainly welcome...
...Many of the risk factors included in the new screen are familiar: advanced age and the presence of Alzheimer's genes (which are associated with the growth of fatty plaques and tangles in the brain that gum up neural connections), for example, have long been clearly linked to dementia. Even heart disease risk factors are somewhat expected, since recent studies show that the same conditions that boost the risk of heart attack, such as high cholesterol, hypertension and atherosclerosis, may also raise the risk of dementia; the theory is that whatever is causing fat deposits in heart vessels may also...
...believe that a lifestyle that incorporates greater socialization and greater use of the mind is what is most important for reducing risk of Alzheimer's," says Nixon, who is also director of the Center of Excellence on Brain Aging at New York University Langone Medical Center. And if this screen can inform more people about their risk of developing dementia - and encourage younger folks to start taking precautions early - perhaps they will be able to prevent the disorder from occurring in the first place...