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MONDAY, June 23 (HealthDay News) -- U.S. researchers boosted the level of early-stage ovarian cancer detection by 20 percent through use of a blood test to detect a tumor marker as well as a woman's report of new-onset symptoms.

Using either test alone only uncovered about 60 percent of early-stage ovarian cancers in a high-risk group of women, while the two techniques together found 80 percent of early-stage tumors, according to finding published Monday in the online version of the journal Cancer.

"They appear to act complementary, and appear to be able to identify women who would not be identified by a blood sample alone, and conversely would not be identified by symptoms alone," said the study's lead author, M. Robyn Andersen, an associate member of the Public Health Sciences Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

More than 21,000 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer annually, and more than 15,000 women die from the disease each year, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS). Currently, only about 20 percent of ovarian cancers are caught in their earliest, potentially curable stages, according to Andersen.

In 2006, Andersen's colleague, Dr. Barbara Goff, director of gynecologic oncology at the University of Washington School of Medicine, published the ovarian cancer symptom-screening index tool, in an effort to help women and doctors clarify which women might have a heightened risk of ovarian cancer.

Important symptoms include pelvic or abdominal pain, bloating, increased abdominal size, difficulty eating, or feeling full quickly. These symptoms must occur more than 12 times per month, and have just recently begun occurring (within the past year), to be considered positive on the symptom-screening tool. For example, if a woman has had abdominal pain for the past 10 years, it's probably not related to ovarian cancer, but to another disorder, such as irritable bowel syndrome.

For the current study, Andersen and her colleagues used the symptom-screening index and a blood test that looks for CA 125, a protein that is often elevated in ovarian cancer. However, CA 125 can sometimes be elevated in women who don't have ovarian cancer, the researchers noted.

The study involved 254 healthy women at high-risk for ovarian cancer because of family history, as well as 75 women about to undergo surgery to remove an ovarian cancer. The women were asked to fill out a questionnaire about their symptoms. All of the women also gave a blood sample to have their levels of CA 125 measured.

The two methods together correctly identified almost 90 percent of the ovarian cancers -- 80.6 percent of the early cancers and 95.1 percent of the later-stage cancers.

About 14 percent of women who had symptoms and had elevated levels of CA 125 did not have ovarian cancer, according to Andersen. These women received transvaginal ultrasound tests for follow-up, according to Andersen.

"This study continues to add on to the work that's been done, but we still have a long way to go with ovarian cancer," commented Debbie Saslow, director of breast and gynecologic cancer for the American Cancer Society.

None of the current screening tools is as accurate as the ACS and other experts would like them to be, she explained. Any of the tests alone misses a significant number of cancers, and unnecessarily worries women who don't have cancer. Saslow said transvaginal ultrasound can be a good test, but it has to be done by an experienced sonographer, and there are no current guidelines to define how much experience is enough.

Additionally, Saslow said that no research has been done to prove that early detection saves lives.

Andersen said the researchers recommend that if you have any of the symptoms of ovarian cancer, and they're new-onset symptoms, that you should discuss them with your doctor. But, she added that, "even with this specific pattern of symptoms, most women probably don't have ovarian cancer, just as most women with a breast lump don't have breast cancer."

More information

To read more about ovarian cancer detection, visit the American Cancer Society  .

FRIDAY, June 20 (HealthDay News) -- While CT screening may help reduce lung cancer deaths among current and former smokers, it won't reduce the risk of death from other smoking-related causes, a new study reports.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., entered data from 1,520 current and former smokers who took part in a CT screening study into a computer simulation model of lung cancer development.

"We used a carefully developed computer model of lung cancer to simulate individuals who smoke and/or develop lung cancers and go on to get screened or treated. It's sort of like the computer game 'The Sims,' except there are no graphics, and smoking and lung cancer are the main events," study lead author Pamela McMahon, senior scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a radiology instructor at Harvard Medical School, said in a prepared statement.

The computer model projections showed that after six years, patients who had five annual CT screenings had a 37 percent increase in lung cancer detection and a 28 percent reduced risk of lung cancer death compared to those who weren't screened. However, those who were screened had only a 4 percent reduced risk of all-cause death.

After 15 years, patients who were screened were 15 percent less likely to die of lung cancer and 2 percent less likely to die of other causes than those who weren't screened.

The findings are in the July issue of the journal Radiology.

"Our study fills in a piece of the puzzle but does not solve it. We are hopeful that randomized trials conducted by the National Cancer Institute will show a benefit from screening. Until then, patients should think carefully about undergoing a test that has no direct evidence of benefit," McMahon said.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 168,840 people will die of lung cancer in 2008, the American Cancer Society estimates. Smoking causes about 87 percent of lung cancers and also causes other types of cancers, as well as heart and respiratory diseases.

More information

The U.S. National Cancer Institute has more about lung cancer screening.

WEDNESDAY, June 18 (HealthDay News) -- Patient "Number Four," taking part in an experimental melanoma treatment program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, was a very lucky man.

After receiving an infusion of his own, fortified immune system T cells, the man's melanoma, which had already spread to a lung and to a lymph node in his groin and had not responded to other therapies, went into complete remission.

Researchers reporting in the June 19 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine say this is the first time a patient's cloned T cells used alone have put an advanced solid-tumor cancer into complete remission.

The man was followed for two years, at which time he was still in remission. Doctors lost track of him after that.

"No way would we say this is a cure but he had a complete response and, fortunately, for him, it lasted longer than just a few months or weeks," said study senior author Dr. Cassian Yee, an associate member at Hutchinson's clinical research division.

"I don't think this represents any standard of care, but I view it as shining a light on the direction in which we perhaps should be heading," said Dr. Louis M. Weiner, director of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C. "It's giving us some insights into what the necessary conditions are for an anti-cancer immune response to be effective."

Immunotherapy, which engages a patient's own immune system to fight cancer, is an emerging art and science. The method holds the promise of being much less toxic than other treatments, though recent research has pointed out that it may not be as safe as once hoped.

Research shows several instances when a patient's own immune system kicked in to oust a cancer even without help from sophisticated new technologies. Dr. Vijay Trisal, assistant professor of surgical oncology at City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte, Calif., recounted two such cases: One, a woman whose melanoma had spread to her lungs, brain and other parts of her body, was stung by a bee and subsequently recovered not only from the bee sting but also from the cancer. Two, a man with advanced melanoma who stepped into a poison ivy patch and experienced a similar recovery.

Similar happenings have been recorded for other types of cancer.

"Maybe there were 10 cells in the body that were very good, sort of a smart bomb against the melanoma, but they weren't enough," Trisal explained. "The bee sting or poison ivy multiplied these smart bombs one thousand times so suddenly this army of 10 became an army of a billion."

And that is essentially what the authors of the new study did, collecting CD4+ T-cells from nine melanoma patients, isolating single cells that they believed would target a certain protein on the tumor cells, cultivating and enriching these cells, and then re-infusing them into the patient.

Patient Four, a 52-year-old man, received five billion cloned CD4+ T cells designed to go after the melanoma-associated NY-ESO-1 antigen. The new cells stayed in the patient's body for 80 days. Two months later, the man's melanoma was gone.

The man received a higher dose than the first three patients but the same or lower dose than the subsequent five patients. The first three had no response at all while the later patients saw some response, but none as dramatic as Patient Four.

"We don't know why he was the lucky one," Yee said. "Maybe it was something specific to him or his tumor. Maybe he had a low-level pre-existing response that we were able to augment."

And therein lies a major problem with immunotherapy as it exists now. "We know this works but it's a shot in the dark," Trisal said. "It works maybe in one in 100 people instead of one in 1,000 where the body itself fights the cancer."

The question is how to make the process more efficient and effective.

"Obviously there's a lot of promise for immunotherapy of this kind but I think that we're several years away from making this any kind of standard therapy," Yee said. At this point, the therapy needs to be standardized to the patient and it can take months to grow the required cells, during which time the patient's condition could deteriorate dramatically.

"It would be helpful to try to streamline the process," Yee said. "[Right now], we can only target a small fraction of patients. What we're looking for in the future is to streamline this process and decrease the time it takes to grow cells and to see if we can target other antigens. This is a proof of principle: Yes, we can use CD4+ clones."

More information

Visit the American Cancer Society   for more on immunotherapy.

FRIDAY, June 13 (HealthDay News) -- Five proteins linked to early development of pancreatic cancer have been identified by U.S. researchers, who said the finding is a step forward in efforts to develop a blood test to detect this type of cancer in the early stages, when cure rates are highest.

"Our team identified, for the first time, protein changes associated with early-stage pancreatic tumor development in genetically engineered mice that were also found to be associated with the presence of disease in humans at an early, pre-symptomatic stage," senior author Dr. Samir Hanash, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, said in a prepared statement.

They first identified the five proteins in mice with a precancerous condition called pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasma. The condition, if left untreated, eventually progresses to full-blown pancreatic cancer. The researchers then looked for the same proteins in blood samples from 13 people with asymptomatic, early-stage pancreatic cancer.

The study was published in this week's issue of the online journal PLoS Medicine.

If this five-biomarker panel can be developed into a commercial screening test, it may prove particularly useful when combined with a currently available test that measures levels of a pancreatic cancer biomarker called CA19.9. Eighty percent of newly diagnosed pancreatic cancer patients have elevated levels of CA19.9, which is not linked to early-stage disease with symptoms.

The researchers suggested that combined use of the five-biomarker panel and the CA19.9 test may greatly improve detection of early-stage pancreatic cancer before the onset of symptoms and may also help distinguish between cancer and pancreatitis, a noncancerous, inflammatory condition.

Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the United States. It has a five-year survival rate of only 3 percent. Because there are no symptoms in the early stages, most patients aren't diagnosed until the cancer has spread beyond the pancreas. This is a major reason for the poor long-term survival rates.

More information

The American Cancer Society has more about pancreatic cancer  .