Articles labeled: cancer

An 8-year-old with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was treated and had a high chance of survival, but only if he received further home treatment and follow ups. But the boy’s mom allegedly just didn’t bother to do it.

It might seem hard to believe, but in court papers filed in Salem District Court prosecutors charge that’s what Kristen Labrie of Salem, Mass., failed to do for her son, Jeremy Fraser.

According to court documents, the boy’s cancer has returned, and doctors said his chances of survival are now more like 10 percent. Jeremy’s dad, Eric Fraser, told reporters Monday that Jeremy might not make it to his ninth birthday, just weeks away.

Labrie, 36, was arraigned on child endangerment charges Monday, pleaded not guilty and was released on her own recognizance after being ordered to have no contact with her son until further notice. The Salem News reported Labrie responded by saying “That’s OK, his dad doesn’t let me see him anyway.”

What an incredibly odd correlation. Apparently if your child attends daycare when they are very young, it can reduce their risk of developing leukemia by 30%. Make sure to whip out that statistic next time someone looks down at you for being a working mom.

The new research, to be presented April 29 at the 2nd Children with Leukaemia Causes and Prevention of Childhood Leukaemia Conference in London, is the first comprehensive analysis of studies investigating the association between social contact and childhood leukaemia.

“Combining the results from these studies together provided us with more confidence that the protective effect is real. Analysing the evidence in this way gives a more reliable answer to the question and a more precise estimate of the magnitude of the effect,” said the study’s leader, Dr. Patricia Buffler, professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health of the University of California, Berkeley.

Man, this kid can’t catch a break. We wish her the best, and a speedy recovery.

Emily Miller was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia in 2002, overcame it in 2005 and was in remission until April of last year when she was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma.

She was excited to finish chemotherapy this August.

But after recent routine labs, doctors told the family that Emily has acute myeloid leukemia. It’s a cancer that starts inside bone marrow and develops quickly.

Her father Cory Miller says Emily told him she didn’t want to die. She says she has about 10 fights left in her.

Finn McConnell, a 15-month-old baby in Puyallup, Washington, has a very rare form of cancer, Opsoclonus Myoclonus Syndrome, which causes antibodies to mistake the brain for a cancerous tumor creating a situation where one’s “own body [attacks the] brain.”

Last December, Finn’s mother took him to the hospital after he began to act funny.

“We had noticed that he had stopped talking. He was having more difficulty crawling. His balance was off and he would wake up absolutely just screaming, probably five to six times a night,” said mother Theresa McConnell.

She thought he had an ear infection. But the doctor’s diagnosis was much more grim than she ever imagined.

“He says ‘I think he has a tumor in the brain,’” she said. “Of course our hearts just drop. You don’t want to get that kind of news.”

Finn was admitted to the hospital for a series of tests.

An MRI revealed that Finn’s tumor was not in his brain, but in his chest.

We’re huge proponents of organ donation, so we’re sure we would have made the same decision as Lisa and Jim Koehne, who donated their 15-year-old son Alex’s liver, pancreas and kidneys after he died from what they thought was bacterial meningitis. So imagine how crushed they must feel after learning their very generous act led to even more heartache:

But it was only after the transplants were performed that autopsy results revealed Alex had a deadly cancer known as anaplastic T-cell lymphoma — not bacterial meningitis.

“We were shellshocked by the whole situation,” Jim Koehne said on “GMA” today. “We had a lot of questions.”

Patient privacy laws prevented the Koehnes from ever meeting the recipients of their son’s organs.

“Two things we did think of [once we learned the truth], one, the recipients, are they OK? Are they all right?” said Lisa Koehne, who added the organ recipients’ doctors had be notified about the situation before she and her husband learned the truth.

“They said they’ll be monitored and looked after,” Jim Koehne said doctors told him.

After the operation, the recipients of the organs all showed evidence of the cancer. The recipient of Alex’s liver underwent three cycles of chemotherapy before finally succumbing to the tumors brought about by the lymphoma. The woman who received Alex’s pancreas initially responded well to treatment but she, too, later died.

Just want to emphasize that we are not placing any blame or fault on the Koehne family.

No, not sperm from a 4-year-old, but rather from the girl’s father who had his sperm frozen before dying of cancer in 2004. Hooray for science, for allowing a person’s legacy to live on even after death.

Her father couldn’t be there when she was born. And he won’t be able to watch her grow up.

But Jaimie-Rose Roberts, born four years after his death, will still be a Daddy’s girl.

James Roberts, who died from cancer at 33, had always dreamed of adding to his family.

As he battled his illness, he and his wife Lisa, who already had a son together, decided to have his sperm frozen to ensure they could have more children after his treatment.

Last week, Mrs Roberts fulfilled their dream on her own after a course of IVF treatment that doctors had warned had only a 20 per cent chance of working.

“She’s amazing,” she said as she held her week-old daughter in her arms.

“I hope James is looking down on us with a smile on his face.

When asked, most parents would say they would give up their life for their kids, but a vast majority of us would never be in the position to have to make that call, anyway. But one UK mother did have to make that heartbreaking decision, and she chose to sacrifice her own life to save her unborn baby. About four months along in her pregnancy, Lorraine Allard was diagnosed with cancer of the liver — and it was in advanced stages. The only way to provide her a chance for survival was to start chemotherapy right away — a move that would necessitate the termination of her pregnancy. Allard decided instead to wait, saying that, “If I am going to die, my baby is going to live.” Her baby was born prematurely at 25 weeks, on November 18. Allard start treatment immediately after, but it was too late. Allard died last week. What a heartbreaking story…

Mr Allard, 34, an oil field technician from St Olaves, near near Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, and his wife already had three daughters, Leah, ten, Amy, eight, and Courtney, 20 months, when they learned they were expecting their first boy.

“We were going to have the full set and didn’t plan to have any more children after that,” Mr Allard said. But in October last year, Mrs Allard started getting stomach cramps and tests at James Paget Hospital in Gorleston revealed her liver was riddled with malignant tumours.

It is believed the disease spread from bowel cancer that had been growing unnoticed for years. Mr Allard said: “The doctors said they couldn’t do anything because she was pregnant. She told them straight away they were not going to get rid of it. She’d have lost the will to fight.”

His wife went into labour just a couple of weeks after the diagnosis and gave birth at the Norfolk and Norwich University NHS Hospital in Norwich.

“He was so tiny, just 1lb 11oz, so the nurse grabbed him and allowed Lorraine to give him a little kiss before he was taken to an incubator,” Mr Allard said.

So, if I am reading this study correctly, women need to pick the best 8 years of their lives so sex it up, otherwise, find another birth control alternative. Better choose wisely:

Taking the pill may reduce a woman’s chances of getting cancer, a new study has found.

But taking it for too long may increase the risk, scientists warn.
In a large-scale study which tracked 46,000 British women over 36 years, researchers found that women on the pill can have up to a 12 per cent lower risk of developing the disease.

But it also showed women who used it for more than eight years had a significantly higher risk of developing cancer, according to the British Medical Journal.