Breast Cancer

IN THE BATTLE against ovarian cancer, three puppies at the University of Pennsylvania will be on the front lines. The pups - Ohlin and Thunder, both Labradors, and McBain, a springer spaniel - have been conscripted to lead the charge in a novel collaboration announced last week between Penn and the Monell Chemical Senses Center. Ovarian cancer claims the lives of more than 14,000 women every year and is the fifth leading cause of cancer-related deaths in women in the nation. The new collaboration takes aim at the silent killer with a combination of chemistry, nanotechnology - and dogs.

I APPLAUD the controller's effort to raise money for breast cancer by encouraging employees in his office to wear blue jeans on Oct. 3 as part of a national denim day. Relaxing an office dress code is an opportunity for employees to reflect on a disease that strikes the women we hold dear - our wives, mothers, sisters and daughters. Jack Zoltowski, Philadelphia

Katie McCollum has spent much of her 18 years figuring out the things that her parents would have helped her through, if they had the chance. But McCollum's mother died of cancer in 2001 when Katie was 8. Her father died eight years later of a heart infection. McCollum has lived on her own for the last 20 months - cooking, cleaning, and paying the bills in the apartment she sometimes shares with her 20-year-old brother. At the same time, she has been earning straight A's at the Agnes Irwin School in Radnor Township and is a star catcher on its softball team.

The people who wanted to call attention to the hopes and tragedies of breast cancer needed a big billboard for their message - the biggest they could find. Hey, how about the skyline itself? Sure. Get the city, the Port Authority, business firms to light the exteriors of their buildings and landmarks pink, the offical ribbon color in the fight against breast cancer. And so, starting tomorrow at dusk, and continuing through October, Philly's skyline is going to glow pink as part of the breast cancer awareness campaign of KYW-TV and the Philadelphia affiliate of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

No one likes having a colonoscopy - a big reason why the colon cancer screening is underused. Nonetheless, growing research suggests that older folks are having unnecessary colonoscopies. The latest study of routine colonoscopies among people over 70 found that nearly a quarter were getting "potentially inappropriate" tests, based on U.S. Preventive Services Task Force guidelines. Those guidelines say that people at average risk of colon cancer should have a colonoscopy once a decade starting at age 50, and stop at age 75. The rationale is that the disease usually progresses slowly, so people near the end of their lives are unlikely to live longer with early detection and treatment.

One in nine American women can now expect to develop breast cancer at some time in their lives, continuing a steady increase in the risk women face, according to the American Cancer Society. The society has been saying since 1987 that the average American woman faced a 1-in-10 chance of developing breast cancer. It revised the risk upward yesterday to reflect an increase in the reported incidence of breast cancer in the 1980s, due in part to better detection methods and the fact that women are living longer.

LOS ANGELES - Drinking as few as three to six glasses of wine per week may increase a woman's lifetime risk of breast cancer by 15 percent, according to an analysis by Harvard researchers. The study, published yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association , reaffirms that heavy alcohol use raises breast-cancer risk, and it adds that light drinking matters, too. Whether women should consider abstaining from even light alcohol consumption, however, is not easily answered, preventive- health experts said.

Thom Bernitsky and Lenore Urban, husband and wife, feel free to speak openly to each other. So when his wife was diagnosed as having breast cancer in 1989, Bernitsky said, they naturally talked about their feelings of devastation and confusion. There were questions that needed to be answered - the "whys," as Bernitsky put it - and depression that needed to be faced and dealt with. They sought counseling and went to sessions together. Bernitsky went to a partners group for husbands of women with breast cancer at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Northeast Philadelphia.

SAN ANTONIO - New research casts doubt on a popular treatment for breast cancer: a week of radiation to part of the breast instead of longer treatment to all of it. Women who were given partial radiation were twice as likely to need their breasts removed later because the cancer came back, doctors found. The treatment uses radioactive pellets briefly placed in the breast instead of radiation beamed from a machine. At least 13 percent of older patients in the United States get this now, and it is popular with working women.

Two years after studies showed no survival benefit for women who underwent bone marrow transplants for advanced breast cancer, the arduous treatment has become so unpopular that researchers cannot find enough patients for studies aimed at improving it and showing a benefit. What's more, some health insurers are refusing coverage for the few breast cancer patients who do want to participate in studies of new bone marrow transplant procedures. The treatment typically costs $60,000 to $100,000.