After Three Cancer Diagnoses, Couple Exchanges Vows
During a “couples chemo” session, Kevin got down on one knee and popped the question to Tim, his partner of 37 years. They tied the knot in the Healing Garden at Dana-Farber.
During a “couples chemo” session, Kevin got down on one knee and popped the question to Tim, his partner of 37 years. They tied the knot in the Healing Garden at Dana-Farber.
Each time the metastatic breast cancer spreads too deeply into Sayde Patel’s lungs, she changes clinical trials. And after six switches in 10 years, she maintains a glass-half-full attitude about the process.
So far, CDK4/6 inhibitors have been shown to be most effective in treating advanced estrogen-receptor positive, HER2-negative breast cancer.
Carol Snyder Halberstadt has been chronicling her life through poetry since she was 5, a means of self-expression she credits as the springboard to a long writing and editing career. When she was diagnosed in the past decade with lung cancer and then lymphoma, putting this part of her personal odyssey into poetry was a … Read more
As scientists map ever more of the epigenetic disruptions that occur in cancer, the implications for cancer therapy are becoming increasingly evident.
Cancer is largely a disease that affects older people. The median age of a cancer diagnosis is 66 years, and one-fourth of new cancer cases are diagnosed in people aged 65 to 74. Adults are most likely to develop solid tumors such as breast, lung, colorectal, prostate, and bladder cancers. In children and adolescents 20 years … Read more
Cancer therapy is increasingly aimed at the fundamental abnormalities within cancer cells – the genes and proteins that normally keep cell division under control, but are damaged or faulty in tumor cells. To understand which genes are abnormal, where they’re located within the genome, and how they affect cell growth, doctors and scientists use a … Read more
The approval of a targeted therapy and an immunotherapy drug for some patients with advanced stomach cancer reflects recent new approaches to this difficult-to-treat cancer that hasn’t had many therapeutic advances in recent years. Stomach cancer, uncommon in the United States but a leading cause of cancer death globally, causes few definitive symptoms in early … Read more
Nausea and cancer are often related in that nausea can be a side effect of treatment, but can nausea be a symptom of cancer itself? Is nausea a sign of colon cancer or other cancers? If there is a tumor that lives in the colon, esophagus, stomach, or somewhere else in the bowel, it can … Read more
Drinking tea has been a practice around the world since ancient times, and often has been seen as a way of promoting good health. Whether tea – either the green or black varieties – can reduce the risk of cancer is a question that has been studied, but hasn’t yielded a definite answer. Made from … Read more
A cancer can be inoperable for a variety of reasons. “Liquid cancers,” such as leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma, are considered inoperable by nature, because they involve cells or tissues that are dispersed throughout the body. Leukemia and multiple myeloma, for example, originate in abnormal cells of the bone marrow, the spongy material within the … Read more
This originally appeared on Vector, Boston Children’s Hospital’s blog. A novel screening method using CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology has revealed new drug targets that could potentially enhance the effectiveness of PD-1 checkpoint inhibitors, a promising new class of cancer immunotherapy. The method, developed by a team at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, uses … Read more
Although they were thoroughly debunked in the 1970s as anti-cancer agents, products made from apricot pits continue to be aggressively marketed to unsuspecting patients, according to a recent report in BuzzFeed. Do apricot seeds fight cancer? What is vitamin B17? The idea that such products could fight cancer arose because apricot pits contain a substance … Read more
CRISPR, a powerful new tool for editing the DNA instruction manual in animals and humans, is proving a boon to cancer research. Scientists say CRISPR has dramatically accelerated the process of making animal models of cancer and is speeding the search for new molecular targets for cancer drugs. The technique is also being used in … Read more
In the past, treating cancers involved classifying them primarily by the organ or tissue where they arose – like the skin, the lungs, the breast, or the colon. Today, it’s often possible to identify the genes and proteins responsible for a tumor’s growth, and, in some cases, to offer a drug treatment that specifically targets … Read more
In 1947, when Dana-Farber Cancer Institute founder Sidney Farber, MD, set out to find a drug treatment for childhood leukemia, cancer treatment took two forms – surgery to cut out cancerous masses, and radiation therapy to burn them out. Cancers that couldn’t be removed or irradiated – either because of their position in the body, because … Read more
In early 2015, Kim Delling had put her 2009 bout with breast cancer behind her. Then, at a routine checkup, her doctor ordered an additional test. “I knew something was up,” recalls Delling, a 50-year-old real estate agent in Wilmington, Mass. The cancer had come back. It had spread to her lungs, liver, and lymph nodes and … Read more
People with diabetes are at higher risk for some, but not all, forms of cancer. The relationship between the two diseases is complex and surrounded with unanswered questions. The strongest links are for cancers of the liver, pancreas, and endometrium, which are twice as likely to occur in people with Type 2 diabetes, according to … Read more
When breast cancer spreads to other parts of the body, such as the bones, brain, liver, or lungs, it is called metastatic (also referred to as advanced or stage IV) breast cancer. While it is not curable, metastatic breast cancer can be treatable — especially with the advent of new therapies, including biologic targeted treatments … Read more
Efforts are under way to develop and test new immunotherapy approaches for prostate cancer.