Cancer Treatment

Baltimore County's newest park has an unusual but inspiring message: "Cancer -- There is hope."The 1-acre parcel at Goucher Boulevard and Fairmount Avenue in Towson will be dedicated today, with life-size bronze sculptures, a cascading waterfall, a computerized registry of cancer survivors and a "Positive Mental Attitude Walk."The 10 a.m. ceremony for the Richard and Annette Bloch Cancer Survivors Park will feature its largest benefactor, Richard A. Bloch, co-founder of H&R Block and a cancer survivor.

BAYTOWN, Texas -- The scrapbook that documents Camelia Cruz's days as a teen-age cancer patient is yellowing now, its photos and newspaper clippings fading with the passage of time.On this sunny Monday morning, Cruz cracked it open, as she does every now and then, unleashing a flood of memories from what seems like a former life. Cruz, now 22, is a survivor of osteosarcoma, a highly malignant bone tumor.The cancer was diagnosed when she was 13. At an age when most girls are worried about pimples and boyfriends, Cruz, the former Camelia Trevino, lost her left leg; doctors had no choice but to amputate above the knee.

Hoping to strengthen their stressed-out immune systems, many people with cancer join support groups, attend yoga classes or take other steps to lift their moods. Do these mind-body interventions help prolong life? A recent study of 1,093 patients with advanced head and neck cancer suggests they do not. The report, published in October in the journal Cancer, found no difference in life expectancy of patients with a strong sense of emotional well-being compared with those with high levels of emotional distress.

Even as a proposal to legalize medical marijuana emerges in Maryland, a backlash over the burgeoning industry has developed in other states - and is likely to influence legislation here. Last week, the Los Angeles City Council tried to rein in the growth of marijuana dispensaries, limiting the number to 70 and imposing tight restrictions on where and how they can operate. And in Colorado, towns are trying to shutter some of the hundreds of dispensaries that have popped up. But supporters of the Maryland proposal say they have learned from problems in states that approved use of the drug without uniform regulations on the dispensaries providing it. The result, they say: Maryland's measure could be among the most stringent in the nation.

Oh, no! Here we go again with another "awareness conversation" ("Breast cancer: Angelina Jolie starts the conversation," May 16). After the fortunes raised by Race for the Cure and the other breast cancer groups, must we consider having both our breasts removed? I'm beginning to think being a woman is a life-long death sentence. In "starting the conversation," why didn't Angelina Jolie mention how much her surgery, reconstruction and rehabilitation cost? If an initial exam is $3,000, what is the price of the entire procedure?

Four years ago, doctors at Chesapeake Urology Associates started ordering the most expensive kind of prostate-cancer therapy for many more of their patients. Before 2007, the large, multi-office practice was prescribing the treatment, known as intensity modulated radiation therapy, for 12 percent of its prostate-cancer patients covered by Medicare, according to data compiled by a Georgetown University researcher. But starting in mid-2007, Chesapeake Urology's referral rate for IMRT more than tripled, rising to 43 percent of the Medicare cases.

Many cancer patients end treatment underweight. Post-treatment breast cancer patients, however, often end up overweight. This can sometimes be attributed to medications such as steroids or chemotherapy. Or the patient is overweight to begin with. Losing this weight is a worthy goal as overweight and obese patients have an increased risk for cancer recurrence, studies say, as well as chronic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. Find your Body Mass Index, a measure of your weight in kilograms divided by your height in meters squared.

BOSTON -- This time, the insurance company is right. This time, the folks whose minds are often clouded by dollars are making sense. And this time, the old familiar scenario -- a patient fighting for payment of life-saving therapy against uncaring insurance company -- is temporarily turned on its head. The Aetna insurance company has announced that it will no longer pay breast cancer patients for bone marrow transplants unless the patients are part of a federally funded experiment. Two weeks after the discovery that a South African researcher phonied up research showing that transplants were more effective than the standard treatment, Aetna stopped funding the therapy that has sent 30,000 women into a roller coaster ride of risk and hope, for very little benefit.

The National Institutes of Health has granted researchers and Genetic Therapy Inc. approval to try to treat lung cancer patients by inserting genes into their tumors.The experimental treatment, which is expected to begin on two dozen patients at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, is designed to discover whether inserting a synthetic gene into patients with a certain type of cancer can slow the growth of tumors.The Gaithersburg biotechnology company is supplying the researchers with vectors, which act as a transportation system that will allow scientists to deliver a specific gene to the correct tumor cells in the lung.

A regional oncology center offering Howard County's first radiation treatments for cancer patients officially opens today in Columbia.The Central Maryland Oncology Center now will offer cancer patients some of the most advanced forms of both radiation and medical oncology treatments -- treatments that usually aren't offered under the same roof."