Cancer Cells

A diagnosis of Stage IV metastatic breast cancer sounds like a death sentence. And, for some, it can be. It is both inoperable and incurable. But cancer experts say the disease is treatable, and its victims' prognoses vary as widely as their individual cancers. Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, learned Monday that her breast cancer, first diagnosed and treated in 2004, has turned up in her bones. But chemical, hormonal and biological drug therapies can be used to keep it in check, said Dr. Michael Schultz, director of the breast center at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson.

Scientists hope that someday stem cells will cure diseases. Pamela Joseph fears that cancer stem cells will kill her first. As her doctors explain it, stem cells are the source of multiple myeloma, a blood cancer the 56-year-old Clarksville woman has been fighting since 2005. Stem cells might also be the reason that the cancer - which has killed one member of Joseph's family - is incurable. The notion of stem cells as potential villains is counterintuitive, given their highly publicized promise for repairing damaged tissues and organs.

CHICAGO -- A drug for use in treating patients with advanced kidney cancer won government approval yesterday. The Food and Drug Administration said the drug, Nexavar, is a significant step forward. The current standard treatment for kidney cancer - immune therapy with interferon or interleukin-2 - has modest benefits and can be extremely toxic. Nexavar, developed at the University of Chicago, has few side effects, and some patients who started taking it more than two years ago are doing well, researchers said yesterday.

Dr. Elizabeth Jaffee gets six or seven e-mails a day from desperate cancer patients and family members, pleading for help or for a spot in one of her studies. The Johns Hopkins University researcher keeps two of these entreaties tacked to a wall in her office. One is from a 13-year-old Alaska boy whose father was dying of pancreatic cancer. The boy begs Jaffee for help: "You have to save my dad. He's my best friend." The other is from a 16-year-old Kansas girl who had already lost her mother to breast cancer.

NEW YORK - In a head-to-head test of two designer cancer medications, researchers say they are now certain that neither of these drugs nor similar ones will have universal applications for lung cancer patients. The discovery by scientists at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston adds yet another chapter to the unfinished - and disappointing - story about several designer cancer drugs, which burst onto the scene with great fanfare but have left many cancer patients without hope. Iressa and Erbitux are members of the class of drugs popularly called targeted therapies.

What should you pack in a family first-aid kit when you travel? That depends, obviously, on who's in your family, what medical conditions they have, and whether you're trekking in the Himalayas or hanging out closer to civilization. At a minimum, said Josh Baker, director of health and safety for the American Red Cross of Massachusetts Bay, you should include: Adhesive tape Antiseptic ointment Band-Aids of assorted sizes Blanket (can be a metallicized emergency blanket that folds to the size of a cigarette pack)

Some cancers possess a potentially deadly wanderlust that causes them to spread from one organ to another, and now scientists have unmasked the genes that trigger breast cancers to invade the lungs. The finding is considered a landmark because it is proof that a specific genetic signature exists for each type of cancer and the organ to which it spreads. Writing in the journal Nature, scientists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City say their finding helps unlock the long-kept secrets of metastasis, the reason cancers become dangerous.

Night shift workers who had low levels of the body's vital "sleep hormone," were significantly more likely to develop breast cancer than those who were awake during the day but got plenty of shut-eye at night, a team of scientists reported this week. The analysis by Boston researchers goes straight to the heart of a question scientists have asked for years: Are night shift workers, because of extended exposure to light, more likely to develop cancer? "Two or three years ago, we probably would have been reluctant to say there was an association," said Dr. Eva Schernhammer, an epidemiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital.

I've heard that magnets reduce pain. Is this voodoo medicine or does it really work? There's no question that some magnets have powerful effects in the body - like the strong, "pulsed" magnets used in diagnostic scanners or those used to treat depression by changing electrical currents in the brain or others used to heal bones. But the evidence is questionable on small, "static" magnets - the kind used to attach things to the refrigerator or, by the aching and hopeful, to reduce pain.

I've heard that there are cancer vaccines. If I get one, will it prevent cancer? Although many cancer vaccines are now being studied, so far, none has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, said Jeffrey Schlom, chief of the Laboratory of Tumor Immunology and Biology at the National Cancer Institute. And when they are approved, they will be aimed not at preventing disease, like the flu and polio vaccines, but to keep cancer from coming back after treatment. Cancer vaccines are "therapeutic," meaning that they're designed to rev up the immune system to fight a cancer that's already present, or to keep the immune system primed to notice and fight any cancer cells that recur.