cancer

Overdiagnosis of invasive breast cancer could be as high as 42 per cent, a paper published by researchers at the University of Sydney's School of Public Health suggests. The study shows the reduced mortality rate resulting from increased mammography screening comes with a flipside: there is 30 to 42 per cent excess of women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer, over that expected, who undergo unnecessary treatment. This translates to about 23 to 29 per cent of all breast cancers diagnosed in NSW as being overdiagnosed and over treated.

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While mastectomies save many women from breast cancer, they often leave the subject feeling depressed, unattractive and ashamed. Some women opt for breast implants in an attempt to regain their lost positive body image, but an Australian doctor has now developed a device that allows women to regrow their lost breast using their own tissue.

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Until the naked mole rats yield their secrets, humanity will still have to worry about treating and controlling cancer. And to that end, one company may have figured out a novel way to prevent the spread of a highly dangerous form of brain cancer, through the use of pulsing electric fields.

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Naked mole rats are unique in many ways. For one, they're the only mammals with a hive mind, obeying their queen as if they were ants. Also, they feel no pain, an adaptation still not fully understood. But most importantly for us, they are the only animals that don't get cancer.

And now, a new study by scientists at the University of Rochester, New York, explains at last why these horrific animals, of all of the world's creatures, are immune to cancer.

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Transforming surgical scalpels into imaging tools could provide instant feedback on suspicious tumors or tissues. European researchers plan for the new imaging tools to enter clinical trials next month.

The concept combines an elecroscalpel with a mass spectrometer to profile the molecular structures of whatever the scalpel happens to cut. It carries out its molecular analysis by using "surgical smoke," or gaseous ions produced as a waste product of the electroscalpels, which requires removal anyway during surgery.

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A new Australian study has revealed good news for people with a new bout of back pain. Contrary to the common fear that back pain could indicate serious diseases such as cancer, research conducted by The George Institute shows that low back pain is rarely caused by serious disease.

Researchers assessed 1200 patients to investigate how commonly low back pain is due to an undiagnosed disease or unrecognised fracture. They followed patients who presented to their GP, physiotherapist or chiropractor with a new episode of low back pain for a period of one year.

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Nanotechnology, lasers, genetics, and cancer? If there was also something about space, this story might have been a PopSci full house. Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), have figured out a way to deliver cancer-stopping RNA directly into the nucleus of a diseased cell. To get into the nucleus, the RNA is wrapped in special gold nanoshells which are then selectively opened by a laser.

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Patients of the future may take a deep breath, and then huff a sigh of relief -- no lung cancer detected.

Such a cancer breathalyzer test could come from the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, where scientists have used gold nanoparticles to build sensors that detect compounds on the breath of lung-cancer patients.

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Chemotherapy is notorious for the toll it takes on the entire body. It kills cancer cells, sure, but it kills a lot of healthy cells, too. But soon a new advance in carbon chemistry may replace the shotgun blast of chemo with a radiation sniper shot.

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It takes researchers years, sometimes decades, to pin down subtle, important findings about your health, but it takes bumbling journalists (or their editors) just a few seconds to screw it all up. Here, a selection of the most misleading headlines, and a few tips to help you spot the hype early.

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Brain cancer is a classic double whammy: the extremely invasive form of cancer is both deadly and difficult to treat. Fortunately, there's a promising solution on the table: tumor painting.

Because brain cancer tends to invade surrounding healthy brain tissue, it blurs the line between tumor and non-tumor tissue, and makes it difficult for surgeons to circumvent the healthy parts of the brain when they saw away at the tumor. On top of that, current imaging techniques produce fairly imprecise representations of the tissue, which only compounds the problem.

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Labs-on-a-chip are generally so specialized and specific in what they do, it's futile to try and explain what makes them particularly special. But in the case of this LoC from UCLA faculty, here's what you need to know: it can carry out upwards of a 1,000 different reactions simultaneously, when most others can barely do two or three.

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Scientists from the Queensland Institute of Medical Research (QIMR) have found two new genes that together double a person's risk of developing melanoma.

As part of an international study, a team at QIMR, led by Professors Nick Hayward and Grant Montgomery, studied the genes of almost 6,000 people together with their mole count. Specific changes in two genes were found to make people more susceptible to developing moles. The researchers went on to show, in another 4,000 people, the same two genes increased the risk of developing melanoma – the most deadly form of skin cancer.

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Using a "chemical nose" array of nanoparticles and polymers, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a fundamentally new, more effective way to differentiate not only between healthy and cancerous cells but also between metastatic and non-metastatic cancer cells. It's a tool that could revolutionise cancer detection and treatment, according to chemist Vincent Rotello and cancer specialist Joseph Jerry.

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Australian researchers have developed gene expression biomarkers which can accurately discriminate pre-cancerous and cancerous colorectal growths from non-cancerous controls.

Presented on 9 June at the Digestive Disease Week conference in Chicago, the preliminary findings are the result of a collaborative study – involving CSIRO, Flinders University and Australian healthcare company, Clinical Genomics Pty Ltd – designed to develop an improved screening/diagnostic test for detecting bowel cancer and significant pre-cancer lesions.

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