Kidney Cancer Patients Have Strong Hope For NHS Constitution, UK

On Tuesday government ministers announced that NHS Patients will now have their rights enshrined in the NHS Constitution. This means that all NHS organizations are legally obliged to provide drugs that have been approved by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and treat all patients with dignity and respect in their choice of location.

The James Whale Fund for Kidney cancer believes the constitution is a step in the right direction and is particularly interested in the clause that ensures all patients will get the drugs they need. Since Kidney Cancer is a type of cancer which cannot be treated with chemotherapy or radiation. Once kidney cancer spreads, then these medications are the only hope left for most of these patients.

Rose Woodward, head of patient support at The James Whale Fund for Kidney Cancer and a survivor of kidney cancer said, “I think the NHS constitution is a great first step to recognising the real sense of ownership a lot of patients feel towards the NHS. We feel passionately about our local hospitals and the clinicians & nurses who look after us. But sometimes patients can feel lost because the NHS is such a huge machine with a life of its own, so many different organisations, each with their own policies, guidelines and initiatives. It’s easy for individual patients to feel they don’t matter anymore. Read more

Genetic Abnormalities Predict Prostate Cancer Survival

Researchers have discovered that the combination of three genetic abnormalities significantly impacts how long a prostate cancer patient is likely to survive with the disease, according to the latest edition of the British Journal of Cancer.

Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) believe that patients could be tested for these genetic abnormalities to help decide the intensity of treatment they should receive.

The team used a technique called fluorescence in situ hybridisation (FISH) to examine three specific genetic alterations in prostate cancer samples from 308 patients: loss of the PTEN gene and rearrangement of the ERG or ETV1 genes.

Previous studies have shown that ERG gene rearrangements occur commonly in prostate cancer as do deletions of all or part of the PTEN gene, but the combined impact of these abnormalities on survival in a large group of patients has not previously been examined.

Study lead author and ICR scientist Dr Alison Reid says the presence or absence of these abnormalities has a major impact on a patient’s risk of dying from prostate cancer.

“In this study, we found that patients who had none of these genetic alterations had a good prognosis – 85.5 per cent were still alive after 11 years,” Dr Reid says. “Happily, the majority of prostate cancer sufferers in this study, 54 per cent, were in this category.” Read more

Bladder Cancer Risks Increase Over Time For Smokers

Risk of bladder cancer for smokers has increased since the mid-1990s, with a risk progressively increasing to a level five times higher among current smokers in New Hampshire than that among nonsmokers in 2001-2004, according to a new study published online November 16 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Furthermore, researchers found that among individuals who smoked the same total number of cigarettes over their lifetime, smoking fewer cigarettes per day for more years may be more harmful than smoking more cigarettes per day for fewer years.

It is well known that cigarette smoking causes bladder cancer, but the influence of various parameters of smoking history, including trends in risk over time, is unclear.

Dalsu Baris, M.D., Ph.D., of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, in Bethesda, Md., and her colleagues from NCI, Dartmouth Medical School, and the departments of health for the states of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, examined bladder cancer risk in relation to smoking practices based on data from a large, population-based case-control study conducted in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont from 2001 to 2004. To examine changes in smoking-induced bladder cancer risk over time, the researchers compared odds ratios for New Hampshire residents in this study with those from two, case-control studies conducted in New Hampshire by Margaret Karagas, Ph.D., of Dartmouth Medical School in 1994 and in 1998. Read more