Scientific American Topic - Cancer

The Math behind Screening Tests

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 10:00:00 EST

It seems like every few months a new study points out the inefficacy of yet another wide-scale cancer screening. In 2009 the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force suggested that many women undergo mammograms later and less frequently than had been recommended before because there seems to be little, if any, extra benefit from annual tests. This same group recently issued an even more pointed statement about the prostate-specific antigen test for prostate cancer: it blights many lives but overall doesn’t save them.

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D'oh! Top Science Journal Retractions of 2011

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 12:30:00 EST

Bad science papers can have lasting effects. Consider the 1998 paper in the journal The Lancet that linked autism to the MMR vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella. That paper was fully retracted in 2010 upon evidence that senior author Andrew Wakefield had manipulated data and breached several proper ethical codes of conduct.

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Anything Boys Can Do...

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 08:00:00 EST

When then Harvard University president Lawrence Summers suggested in 2005 that innate differences between men and women may account for the lack of women in top science and engineering positions (and subsequently resigned), he was referring to the greater male variability hypothesis. Women, it holds, are on average as mathematically competent as men, but there is a greater innate spread in math ability among men. In other words, a higher proportion of men stumble mathematically, but an equally high proportion excel because of something in the way male brains develop. This supposedly explained why boys tend to dominate math competitions and why men far outnumber women in elite university math departments. Since then, scientists have put the variability hypothesis to the test, and it comes up short.

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2011 Nobel Laureate Ralph Steinman Explains Discovery of Cells Used for Cancer Treatment [Video]

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:04:00 EST

In the quest to cure cancer, many researchers have started looking beyond toxic chemicals and harsh radiation and instead are trying to harness the body's immune system.

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How Ralph Steinman Raced to Develop a Cancer Vaccine--And Save His Life (preview)

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:04:00 EST

Peering through a microscope at a plate of cells one day, Ralph M. Steinman spied something no one had ever seen before. It was the early 1970s, and he was a researcher at the Rockefeller University on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. At the time, scientists were still piecing together the basic building blocks of the immune system. They had figured out that there are B cells, white blood cells that help to identify foreign invaders, and T cells, another type of white blood cell that attacks those invaders. What puzzled them, however, was what triggered those T cells and B cells to go to work in the first place. Steinman glimpsed what he thought might be the missing piece: strange, spindly-armed cells unlike any he had ever noticed.

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Why We Don't See Lions, Bombs and Breast Cancers

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 08:28:00 EST

Let’s imagine that I suggest you look for lions while we are strolling through the park. For most people reading this, the local park will be an unlikely place to find a lion. If you take my request seriously, you might look around but you would not spend vast amounts of time on the search. If you saw something of a light brown color out of the corner of your eye, you would probably be reluctant to jump up and down, shouting, “I saw one.” Now let us suppose that we are on safari in Kenya, strolling through the Serengeti and I suggest that you look for lions. In this case, you might spend the whole day on this search and you might well jump up and down, shouting, “I saw one!” as that light brown, furry something disappeared from sight.

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Vitamin D Prevents Fractures, But Role in Cancer Remains Unclear

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 20:15:00 EST

Taking v itamin D , along with calcium supplements, may reduce your risk of breaking a bone, but there's not yet enough evidence to say whether it may lower your risk of cancer, a new analysis concludes.

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Prolonged Sitting Linked to Breast and Colon Cancers

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:05:00 EST

WASHINGTON -- Our culture of sitting may be responsible for 173,000 cases of cancer each year, according to new estimates.

Physical inactivity is linked to as many as 49,000 cases of breast cancer and 43,000 cases of colon cancer a year in the United States, said Christine Friedenreich, an epidemiologist at Alberta Health Services-Cancer Care in Canada.

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8 Mobile Apps to Help Manage Your Health [Slide Show]

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:30:00 EST

Thousands of health and medical apps can be had for a minute or less of download time, and sometimes a dollar or two. Because choosing among mobile applications can be an overwhelming experience, Scientific American has put together a list--based on functionality, content and customer reviews--of ones you may find useful. [More]

U.S. Glossed Over Cancer Concerns Associated with Airport X-Ray Scanners

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:05:00 EST

Look for a PBS NewsHour story on X-ray body scanners, reported in conjunction with ProPublica, to air later this month. [More]

Did Alternative Medicine Extend or Abbreviate Steve Jobs's Life?

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:00:00 EST

Exact details of the alternative natural and traditional therapies tried by Steve Jobs before he underwent surgery in 2004 and eventually died of pancreatic cancer earlier this month have not been disclosed. (A representative from Apple declined to comment on any aspect of the Apple co-founder's illness.) He reportedly restricted his diet to just fruits or just fruits and vegetables, tried out something called hydrotherapy and consulted psychics. In any case, a mounting body of scientific and anecdotal reports provides compelling evidence about the potential impact, both positive and negative, of so-called complementary practices on the health and longevity of cancer patients following their diagnosis. And, although Jobs's unconventional early-treatment choices may not have done much to stave off the spread of deadly cancer cells in his case, they provide an opportunity to discuss what makes cancer grow and how to stop it.

Jobs had a rare form of pancreatic cancer known as pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (pNET). Accounting for about 1 percent of all pancreatic cancers, pNET is a cancer of the endocrine cells, known clinically as the islets of Langerhans, which exist in small clusters throughout the pancreas. These cells produce hormones such as insulin, which lowers blood sugar, and glucagon, which increases it.

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Boys Should Get HPV Vaccine, Too, CDC Says

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:10:00 EST

A vaccine originally intended to prevent cervical cancer in girls should be given to boys as well, an advisory panel for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today (Oct. 25).

The panel voted to recommend the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine be given to boys ages 11 to 12. The vaccine is already recommended for girls of this age.

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Hairdressers Can Be Skin Cancer Detectors

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:03:08 EST

Humans have mostly abandoned the grooming strategies of our chimp cousins. So there's a good chance your scalp and the back of your head go largely unexamined. But this inattention can leave skin cancers undetected. [More]

Outsmarting Cancer: Why It's So Tough

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 08:00:00 EST

Name : Brent Stockwell Title : Associate professor, Columbia University [More]

A New Ally against Cancer: Vaccines (preview)

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 08:00:00 EST

For decades cancer specialists have offered patients three main therapies: surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. (Some cancer survivors pointedly refer to this harsh trinity as “slash, poison and burn.”) Over the years continual refinements in these admittedly blunt instruments have made the more severe side effects increasingly manageable. At the same time, effectiveness has improved markedly. And new, very targeted drugs (Herceptin and Gleevec) have become available for a few specific cancers. All told, the average five-year survival rate for invasive cancers as a group has risen from 50 percent to 66 percent in the past 30-plus years. In spite of these gains, many cancer survivors will not have a normal life span.

Researchers have long suspected that they could add a weapon that would dramatically increase cancer survival rates without producing serious side effects if they could just figure out how to prod the body’s own immune system to do a better job of fighting malignancies. But decades of effort met with one failure after another. In the 1980s, for instance, overheated hopes that an immune system molecule called interferon would rouse the body’s defenses to cure all or most cancers were dashed after a few more years of research. Today interferon has a place but is not the cure-all once envisioned. By the first decade of this century a great number of clinical trials were being conducted using lots of different types of vaccine-related approaches, but nothing seemed to be working. It was starting to look as though the long-hoped-for general weapon against a broad range of tumors would never materialize.

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The Puzzle of Pancreatic Cancer: How Steve Jobs Did Not Beat the Odds—but Nobel Winner Ralph Steinman Did

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 07:00:00 EST

Steve Jobs was a rare case, right down to his death. Announced Wednesday, Jobs's death from "complications of pancreatic cancer" only hints at the vast complexity of the disease to which he succumbed at the age of 56. [More]

Why Is Pancreatic Cancer So Deadly?

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:30:00 EST

Editor's note: This story originally appeared in 2008. We are reposting a version of it in light of the death of Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs from complications from pancreatic cancer. Patients tend to die shortly after diagnosis, but Jobs was unusual in that he survived seven years after he got the bad news (he had a less aggressive form of the cancer). Overall, the odds of a patient living five years is just 5.8 percent, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( pdf ).

Editor's note (10/17/11): The following clarification comes from Allyson Ocean of the New York–Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center: Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer, a malignancy of the endocrine cells of the pancreas, which usually has a more indolent, slow-growing course than adenocarcinoma of the pancreas, which is a malignancy of the exocrine cells of the pancreas. Patients with adenocarcinoma have a worse prognosis and usually more rapid deterioration. Also, the two cancers are treated in different ways. [More]

Cancer Vaccines

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 17:30:08 EST

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Combating Cancer with Edmond Fischer

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:55:00 EST

Nobel Laureate Eddie Fischer was born in Shanghai in 1920. Since then, China has emerged as an economic superpower. Now it’s becoming a scientific heavyweight too. Tong Qing belongs to the newest generation of Chinese scientists. She decided to study cancer after a family friend became ill with breast cancer. In this film, she tells Fischer about life and research in China today.