Looking for Something Edgy?

Planet Cancer has Attitude. Take the various top ten lists for instance - Top 10 Worst Reponses to Nosy Questions About Scars, or Top 10 Ways to Get a Taste of the Chemo Experience.

The State of the Nation's Health Care

The American College of Physicians this week decried America's troubled healthcare system and urged a concerted effort to fix it. In a paper released last month, the ACP argued that physicians are ethically bound to get involved not only for the good of their patients but also for the society they live in. Where they stand can be found here.

In the Lab

A new urine test appears better at detecting prostate cancer than the widely-used PSA blood test. That's what researchers at the University of Michigan report in the February 1 issue of Cancer Research. Their tests were able to more accurately identify the presence and absence of cancer than PSA tests do today. Until the results are confirmed on a much larger scale, these tests (developed by Gen-Probe, Inc. of San Diego, CA) would be used only to supplement the PSA blood screen.

Another option when faced with a rising PSA might someday be a vaccination against prostate cancer. So say scientists at the University of Southern California who have developed an experimental prostate cancer vaccine that marshals an immune system attack against a prostate cancer stem cell protein. It successfully blocked cancer in 90% of the mice genetically altered to develop prostate cancer, they write in the February 1 issue of Cancer Research.

With money from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), researchers at Wake Forest University have been investigating whether eating soy early in life (before puberty) might protect women from breast cancer later in life. You can read more about the research here.

And finally, The Department of Defense has commissioned a study from Rice University and the Texas Medical Center to determine whether a new drug based on carbon nanotubes can help prevent people from dying of acute radiation poisoning following radiation exposure. The new study follows earlier tests that found the drug was more than 5,000 times more effective at reducing the effects of acute radiation injury than the most effective drugs currently available. Read more about the research here in the Houston Chronicle.