Lung Cancer

North County High School freshman Jack Andraka stood on the auditorium stage, speaking about the invention that earned him the $75,000 grand prize at the recent Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Behind him stood Dr. Anirban Maitra, a professor in the Johns Hopkins University's department of pathology who gave Jack use of his lab to craft his invention, a cheap and effective "dipstick-sensor" method of testing blood or urine to identify early-stage pancreatic cancer and other diseases.

North County High School freshman Jack Andraka stood on the auditorium stage, speaking about the invention that earned him the $75,000 grand prize at the recent Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Behind him stood Dr. Anirban Maitra, a professor in the Johns Hopkins University's department of pathology who gave Jack use of his lab to craft his invention, a cheap and effective "dipstick-sensor" method of testing blood or urine to identify early-stage pancreatic cancer and other diseases.

An epidemic of lung cancer among American women has been quietly growing for decades, and an end to the upsurge appears nowhere in sight, doctors will report today. For women, deaths due to lung cancer now outstrip those caused by breast cancer and all gynecologic cancers combined, the researchers will report today. The team of medical scientists who assessed the scope of lung cancer in women say mortality has continued to climb in women even as smoking and deaths from the disease have declined in men. Deaths caused by smoking rose 600 percent in U.S. women from 1930 to 1997, and continues to rise, the team of scientists said.

Alan Gross, the Potomac man serving 15 years in Cuba after carrying communications equipment into the communist island nation, continues to communicate with supporters from the military hospital where he is held. The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington said Monday that Gross called to express his gratitude for the efforts of the Jewish community to push for his release. "I worked many years to reinforce the concept of community and I really feel it," Gross, 63, said during the telephone call last week, according to the council.

At first glance, the scene looked like the start of an ordinary, if rather large, yoga class. Dozens of women and a few men sat on yoga mats, preparing to inhale and exhale and greet the sun. But messages affixed to the backs of many participants made clear this was a special event. "I am doing yoga in memory of Deborah Goodman, my mom," read Marjorie Goodman's message. "My mom died of lung cancer 16 years ago," she explained. "It's an insidious disease. I'm here to support this cause.

CT scans can reduce deaths by 20 percent in older, heavy smokers by detecting tumors earlier, according to results released Thursday from an eight-year-long national study. The study, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute and launched in 2002, aimed to see if the tests, which are more sensitive than X-rays, would affect the outcomes for those with lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the country. The disease was estimated to have killed 159,390 people in 2009, according to the institute — more people than killed by breast, prostate, colon and pancreatic cancer combined.

The death of ABC news anchor and longtime smoker Peter Jennings this week has drawn new media attention to an old and brutal killer - lung cancer. "It's a very tough disease, really a collection of diseases ... and you don't want any of them," said Dr. Michael J. Thun, head of epidemiological research at the American Cancer Society. Today it kills more people in the United States than any other form of cancer. On Monday, the day after Jennings' death, actress Barbara Bel Geddes, former star of the soap opera Dallas, died of lung cancer at 82. The disease has been one of the hardest forms of cancer to cure, among the most difficult to survive and least likely to win public sympathy.

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 biologist reported the discovery of a gene yesterday that may be a key player in lung cancer, one of the nation's leading killers.If the discovery is borne out by further studies, it could lead to treatments and diagnostic tests for a disease that is expected to kill 143,000 Americans this year, said Carlo M. Croce, a molecular geneticist at Temple University in Philadelphia and a member of the scientific team that made the discovery.Mr. Croce is internationally recognized in the rapidly expanding field of molecular genetics, which in the years ahead appears likely to solve a host of medicine's long-standing mysteries.

A new generation of CT scanners that can detect cancer in the lungs as small as a grain of rice - when the tumor is still highly curable - is raising hopes that screening may drastically reverse the grim outlook for lung cancer just as mammography did for breast cancer. A large, long-term study reported in yesterday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that at least 88 percent of patients whose early-stage lung cancer was detected through CT screening would survive for 10 years after the tumor was surgically removed.

It is irresponsible to claim, as the letter writer from Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) does, that eating meat is equivalent to smoking cigarettes ("Unhealthful foods kill more Americans every year than tobacco," May 13). In moderation, eating meat is perfectly fine. Studies of the supposed link between meat and cancer regularly find statistically weak or no associations. That's nowhere approaching the level of risk from cigarettes on lung cancer, which range upward of 20-fold.

Alan Gross, the Maryland man who is serving 15 years in a Cuban prison after taking communications equipment into the communist nation, is asking authorities there to let him return to the United States to visit his ailing mother before she dies. Gross, who grew up in the Baltimore area and lived in Potomac, told CNN that he and his lawyer had written to the Cuban government "on more than one occasion" to request permission to see Evelyn Gross. "I have a 90-year-old mother who has inoperable lung cancer.

The da Vinci robotic technology allows doctors to perform more precise surgeries. The technique also enables patients to recover more quickly with fewer complications in many cases. The technique is used to perform many different types of surgeries. Dr. Gavin Henry, program director of the surgical residency at Saint Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, uses it over traditional lobectomy surgery to treat patients with lung cancer. The hospital said Henry is poised to outpace every surgeon in Maryland in the use of robotic technology for this operation.

Regarding the letter to the editor published Dec. 9 in the Open Forum, "Steaming over smoking ban:" I find all of your arguments faulty.  First let me speak to "how would enforcement work?" It's simple, when someone, who is not a smoker, sees a person smoking where they should not be smoking, they simply ask the person to put it out. If the smoker refuses then a call to police is the next step. If the smoker is the only person on the prohibited ground, then I guess there is no problem because the stinky dangerous smoke from your cigarette is not bothering anyone.  Hopefully you would take the butt with you, but more often than not it ends up on the ground.

Taken from the pages of The Aegis dated Thursday, Dec. 7, 1961: Harford County officials were up in arms over the Maryland State Roads Commission's decision a half century ago this week to eliminate the interchanges at Routes 155 in Havre de Grace and Route 152 in Joppa from their plans for a Northeastern Expressway. Harford County had a strong supporter in then Comptroller Louis M. Goldstein. Mr. Gold stein stated, "Are you working for the taxpayers of Maryland or the investment houses of New York?"

Robert Rokuro Omata, a retired U.S. Public Health Service captain and National Institutes of Health administrator, died of lung cancer May 10 at the Baltimore Washington Medical Center. He was 90 and lived in Millersville. Born and raised in Hanford, Calif., he was the son of a grocer and a homemaker who had immigrated from Japan many years earlier. When World War II began, he was in his senior year as a biology major at the University of California at Berkeley. "He and his family were among 120,000 loyal American citizens of Japanese ancestry who were forced to evacuate their homes in several Western states and live in relocation camps," said his daughter, Donna R. Omata of Baltimore.

Should I get scanned? That is the question some current and former smokers have been asking themselves in the wake of widely publicized findings on the benefit of early lung cancer screening. The study, reported last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, concluded that heavy smokers who undergo spiral computed tomography (CT) scans significantly improve their odds of catching cancerous lesions in the earliest and most curable form. Screening for lung cancer sounds like a no-brainer.

Dana Reeve, an actress whose days of sunny fame with her star husband, Christopher, turned into an odyssey of tragedy and hope, died Monday night of lung cancer. Mrs. Reeve, 44, gave up her entertainment career to care for her husband during his 10 years of almost complete paralysis, when she and Christopher became fighting symbols for those who refused to give up, even against the most desperate odds. She used her celebrity to campaign for stem cell and other medical research to treat spinal cord injuries like the one that paralyzed her husband, best known for his Superman starring roles.

James O. Johns, a retired millwright and former Glen Burnie resident, died May 3 of pneumonia at Triumph Hospital in Houston. He was 76. His wife of 55 years, the former Carolyn Sue Fowler, a homemaker, died May 9, six days after her husband, of lung cancer at Legends Rehabilitation Center in Tomball, Texas. She was 72. Mr. Johns was born in Covington, Va., and later moved with his family to Glen Burnie, where he graduated in 1952 from Glen Burnie High School. He worked for 30 years as a millwright and was a member of Millwright Local 1548 until retiring in 1989.