The FDA has just determined that manufacturers of long-acting opioid  pain killers will have to sponsor educational programs for physicians and for patients regarding use of these drugs. Warnings about their abuse or addiction potential will also be included in the educational material. This decision is in response to the high incidence of deaths stemming ... read more »

An attempt to save the life of a fellow cancer researcher at Washington University has created a model of cancer therapy that may become a norm in the future, according to Gina Kolata of the New York Times. Dr. Lukas Wartman was dying of acute lymphoblastic leukemia after trying rounds of conventional therapies such as ... read more »

Among white Americans, skin cancer is the most common form of cancer. One in five people from this background will get some form of skin cancer during their lifetimes, according to epidemiological data. The three major forms of skin cancer are basal cell carcinoma, squamos cell carcinoma and melanoma. Recently, Jilali Han and co-authors of ... read more »

In the New England Journal of Medicine recently an article summarized the progress made after 200 years of research into the origins and treatment of cancer. The real leap in progress has occurred since the 1960′s, when the structure of DNA was deduced. Starting in the 1970′s it became possible to manipulate DNA sequences to ... read more »

Researchers have confirmed that there is a connection between the magnitude of depressive symptoms and both the quality of life of heart failure patients and also the frequency of heart attacks and the prospect of survival in these patients. Kyoung Suk Lee, PhD, of the University of Kentucky at Lexington reported these results from a ... read more »

Dr. Daniela Jakubovicz of Wolfson Medical Center in Israel recently reported on a study she conducted investigating weight loss through varying meal timing and composition.  Her study involved 193 obese patients divided into two meal plans. One plan (for women) allocated 600 calories to breakfast, 500 to lunch, and 300 to dinner. The other plan ... read more »

Almost twenty percent of American adults smoke cigarettes, with more male smokers than female. There has been a steady decline in the percentage of US adults who smoke, however, since the 1960′s when the surgeon general declared that smoking was dangerous for health, and a cause of cancer. Even in the last 10 years, the ... read more »

Researchers from the American Cancer Society report in a recent article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology that deaths rates from lung cancer show sharply different patterns in different regions of the United States, over the last fifty years. In some southern states, women below 50 years of age (born after 1960) have double the ... read more »

Lauren McCullough, MSPH, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill conducted a population-based study in pre- and post-menopausal women, investigating the impact of exercise on incidence of breast cancer. The study involved 1504 women with cancer and 1555 women without cancer. Women who engaged in physical exercise 10 to 19 hours per week ... read more »

This question was asked by Rachel Goldman PhD and her research group from New York University. To provide an answer, they conducted a study on 40 individuals who underwent MRI brain imaging after having received bariatric surgery for obesity. According to Goldman, clinical experience with patients who receive bariatric surgery shows that some patients lose ... read more »

According to an article in MedPage Today, the American Medical Association (AMA) is on record as disagreeing with the US Preventative Task Force recommendation from 2009 that women under 50 need not be required to undergo a routine annual mammogram to detect early stage breast tumors. The AMA recommends an annual mammogram for women above ... read more »

Pharma company Merck announced results at a sleep conference recently from a large clinical trial on its new sleeping aid called suvorexant. These results demonstrated that the new drug allowed people with chronic insomnia to get to sleep faster and sleep longer than those taking a placebo. In one study, after 3 months of treatment, ... read more »

During the period from 2012 to 2022, the number of cancer survivors will grow from about 14 million to 18 million. This means that today, almost 5 percent of the American population are survivors of this disease after their diagnosis. Among men, the leading cancer of survivors is prostate (43 percent of the total) while ... read more »

Spanish oncologist Jose Baselga is one of the leading cancer research scientists in the world. Originally from Vall D’ Hebron Hospital in Barcelona, he is now at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He was interviewed recently about 3 key clinical trials he directed, from which he predicted that treatment of breast cancer would take a ... read more »

An article in MedPage Today considers the fact that over the past few decades, opioid prescriptions have multiplied dramatically, but opioid abuse has also increased in parallel among chronic pain patients. It might be a surprising fact that opioid analgesics cause more deaths from overdose than either cocaine or heroin, in the United States. Short-acting ... read more »