National Cancer Institute

WASHINGTON NEW GUIDELINES ON MAMMOGRAMS In a major reversal, the National Cancer Institute is announcing plans to change its own guidelines on recommending mammograms for premenopausal women. Instead of urging that all women aged 40 to 49 be screened every year or two with mammograms, a position the institute has held since 1987, the NCI, citing inconclusive evidence from eight randomized trials and controversy among specialists, is now proposing that women under 50 get the X-rays only when advised to do so by their doctors.

Update: Exercise, diet still can curb hypertension The government has issued updated guidelines on high blood pressure that emphasize that exercise and diet are often enough to prevent hypertension. They also cite research casting doubt on the benefit of some products promoted as blood pressure reducers. Calcium supplements and fish oil supplements, for example, show only modest effects, according to the agency's guidelines, which appear in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.

JUVENILE EAR INFECTIONS. Parents of children with recurrent ear infections, take note - 75 percent of them could be controlled just by eliminating milk or milk products. That's according to Fred Pullen, a Miami ear, nose and throat specialist who says that blocked eustachian tubes - the passages between upper throat, nose and inner ear - that cause the problem can result from an allergy, as in an allergy to milk. Substitute calcium supplements for dairy products, Pullen says. CHEMICAL HAZARDS.

Five students who attended the Pennsylvania College of Podiatric Medicine inexplicably have been stricken with a rare form of testicular cancer. The rarity of the condition and the unusually high number of victims have caused officials at the school and outside researchers to suspect that something in the environment might be responsible for the disease. Acting through their national association, officials at the college have asked the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to send a team of specialists to Philadelphia to investigate the situation.

Announcement of the selection of Dr. Robert C. Young as chief executive of the Fox Chase Cancer Center marked the end of a 10-month search, a screening process that involved many of the nation's leading oncologists and medical administrators. Elected president of the cancer center at an Oct. 13 meeting of its board of directors, Young is to take office on Dec. 15, succeeding John R. Durant. Since Durant left office early in the year, a committee headed by G. Morris Dorrance Jr., chairman of the Fox Chase Cancer Center's board, has been reviewing candidates for the office.

Scientists at the National Cancer Institute have given their views on mammograms for women in their 40s. What should you do? Question: I'm a 41-year-old woman who has never had a mammogram. Should I get one now? Answer: The National Cancer Institute says yes for women 40 or over, but start by talking to your doctor. Whether you get one every year or every two years in your 40s depends on your risk factors; after age 50, doctors recommend the tests every year. Q: What are the known risk factors?

Despite all the research and therapies, more and more American women are suffering and dying from breast cancer. It now strikes one of nine. If you have a relative who has had the disease you are aware of the terrible suffering involved. My mother was diagnosed as having a breast tumor in 1983 and, after an initial "cure," died from its spread five years later. I happen to have had a direct influence on federal research policy on the possible relationship between diet and breast cancer when I was staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition almost two decades ago. Hearings on the link between diet and chronic diseases, including breast cancer, led to the federal adoption of dietary goals.

Michael Freilick of Cherry Hill has been named a consultant to the National DES Education Program, a new $2.2 million program launched by the National Cancer Institute. DES, or diethylstilbestrol, is the synthetic estrogen drug widely prescribed to pregnant women from 1941 to 1971. It has been linked to miscarriages and uterine cancer in women whose mothers took DES, and might be associated with fertility problems and testicular cancer in men. Freilick, a DES son and a testicular cancer survivor, founded and runs the DES Sons Network, a national support network for men exposed to the drug.

I reply to John R. Durant's May 24 Op-ed Page article, "People do survive cancer. " Dr. Durant forgot to finish the sentence with: "But many more people die from it. " In 1971, when Congress declared war on cancer, 600,000 Americans got cancer; this year, nearly one million Americans will get cancer. Naturally, there will be more survivors in 1986 but there will also be many more deaths than there were in 1971. According to the American Cancer Society, more than 300,000 Americans died of cancer in 1971, but nearly 500,000 Americans will die of cancer in 1986.

I WOULD PERSONALLY like to thank Dr. Randy Pausch, who recently passed away, for all of his dedicated work in promoting awareness of pancreatic cancer and the lack of adequate funding from the federal government. Pancreatic cancer is an insidious disease with no known cause, no known cure and little money devoted to research. It claims almost as many American lives as breast cancer each year, twice as many as AIDS and has the poorest five-year survival rate of any cancer, at only 5 percent.

Fox Chase Cancer Center will become part of the Temple University Health System, officials announced Thursday. The combination, which is expected to close next summer, will assemble two storied Philadelphia healthcare insitutions, which both have faced fiscal difficulties lately. Temple, based in North Philadelphia, will get a nationally-recognized research partner that will enable the system to create a cancer unit at Temple's Jeane's Hospital. Fox Chase, which has made several attempts to expand, will achieve that, taking over some 30,000 square feet of space at Jeanes.

Small cartoon-captioning study shows men out-funny women If you accept the notion that New Yorker cartoon captions are a good indicator of wittiness, then men are funnier than women - but just barely, according to research from the University of California, San Diego. Psychologists recruited college students, 16 males and 16 females, and gave them 45 minutes to write captions for 20 New Yorker cartoons. Then, in a series of elimination rounds, 34 males and 47 females judged the resulting captions, without knowing the genders of the writers.

Melissa Dribben is an Inquirer staff writer I went to a dermatologist the other day for a skin-cancer check. I had made the appointment two months earlier. She was a busy doctor and didn't have an opening any sooner. As far as I could tell, I had no suspicious changes in any moles or angry spots threatening to metastasize like a terrorist network and kill me. But I knew I was at risk. As a teenager and well into my 20s, I had brazenly consorted with the enemy. My prescient mother had warned me to stop basting myself with iodine-laced baby oil and sautéing, an hour on each side, on the scorching tar beach of my flat roof.

By Carl Golden During my ritual morning reading of the newspapers, I normally skip over items dealing with some new study or other, accompanied by a jumble of statistics to support its findings. Recently, though, one such story gave me pause. Its headline was: "20 percent rise in number of survivors of cancer. " It said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute had found that 65 percent of those diagnosed with cancer live for at least another five years, and 40 percent live for another 10 years or more.

Richard G. Carroll, 52, of Wallingford, a cancer researcher at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, died Friday, Sept. 24, of complications from pancreatic cancer at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1999, Dr. Carroll joined the medical school's department of molecular and cellular engineering. He later shifted to the department of pathology and laboratory medicine. He was principal investigator at Penn for several grants from the National Institutes of Health to explore ways to condition the immune system to fight cancer.

Focus research on other cancers Let's not depend upon future "mistakes" to move forward with cancer research and treatments. ("The mistake that led to a revolution in cancer research," Wednesday). We should join with the 18 bipartisan representatives who have urged the National Cancer Institute's director, Harold Varmus, to increase NCI's commitment to research for the deadliest cancers. We don't need to wait for accidental findings (wonderful as they may be) to move other cancers, like pancreatic, multiple myeloma, ovarian, liver, and lung, to the improved overall survival of a cancer like chronic myeloid leukemia (CML)

Rates of thyroid cancer are well above the national average throughout the Philadelphia region. But why? They may be related to broader statistics that show high rates of many types of cancer in the Mid-Atlantic states, for reasons that scientists do not understand. Or, some experts suggest, they may be the result of all the medicine practiced locally - more tests lead to more diagnoses. Thyroid cancer also is found more often in older people, and more of them live here than in many other areas.

Fox Chase Cancer Center yesterday announced that it was abandoning its efforts to expand into neighboring Burholme Park. The cancer center decided not to appeal a Commonwealth Court decision last month barring its plans. In December 2008, Orphans' Court Judge John W. Herron ruled that Fox Chase was not entitled to build on 19.4 acres of the 65-acre park. Fox Chase had appealed that decision to Commonwealth Court. Fox Chase's plan to spend $1 billion over 20 years on the expansion was met by strong neighborhood opposition.

The battle for cancer patients in Delaware is heating up. Two months after Fox Chase Cancer Center said it was considering a second campus in northern Delaware, its biggest rival, the University of Pennsylvania Health System, announced its first foothold in the state. Penn has a new partnership with Bayhealth Medical Center in Dover that will link patients there to experts and clinical trials at Penn, a National Cancer Institute comprehensive cancer center. Penn has similar relationships with nine health systems in Pennsylvania and seven in New Jersey.

I WOULD PERSONALLY like to thank Dr. Randy Pausch, who recently passed away, for all of his dedicated work in promoting awareness of pancreatic cancer and the lack of adequate funding from the federal government. Pancreatic cancer is an insidious disease with no known cause, no known cure and little money devoted to research. It claims almost as many American lives as breast cancer each year, twice as many as AIDS and has the poorest five-year survival rate of any cancer, at only 5 percent.