Screening can save lives, which is why the NHS offers checks for breast, cervical and bowel cancers. Breast screening tries to pick up cancer at an early stage when it may be more treatable. Cervical screening…
Is cancer just a mathematical game of chance?
stuartpilbrow/Flickr
What causes cancer? This deceptively simple question has a devilishly complex answer. So when US researchers proposed a relatively simple mathematical formula to explain a long-standing conundrum in cancer…
Fact: In 2012, there were 14 million new cancer cases worldwide, and 8.2 million cancer related deaths. Fact: About 70% of all cancer deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. Fact: The number…
The old suffer more than they should.
Peter Hermes Furian
In 1971 Richard Nixon declared “War on Cancer” with the signing of the National Cancer Act. Significant progress has been made in the intervening 44 years – and Europe has been at the forefront of many…
There are ways non-scientists can assess if the research underlying big claims about cancer cures stacks up.
Rafael Anderson Gonzales Mendoza/Flickr
Cancer is big news; we often hear of some kind of cure for some version of the illness. But whether it’s a “natural cure” or a promising molecule on its way to becoming a new medicine, there are ways non-scientists…
If we want to know whether screening saves lives, we need to show a reduction in the cancer death rate rather than an increase in the survival rate.
Steven Depolo/Flickr
Cancer screening is beneficial when it’s able to prevent people dying from cancer. And it should clearly be adopted where there’s evidence showing this. But using cancer survival rates to promote screening…
The cost of treatment is one of the biggest areas of the NHS budget and one of the most sensitive areas of discussion. We would all like to have an infinite amount of money to spend treating diseases and…
If you’re a teetotaller, your friends have likely tried to convince you to taste red wine by swearing on its multiple health benefits. These benefits have been credited to a compound found in red wine…
While the medical world is transfixed by the urgency of finding and testing new potential treatments for Ebola, the House of Lords is wrestling with how to employ treatments that have not been tested for…
Nine out of ten cancer patients die because cancer cells enter the blood circulation, spread and form tumours at distant organs. In circulation, cells can move individually or in a cluster. It is believed…
Widely proscribed around the world for its recreational uses, cannabis is being used in a number of different therapeutic ways to bring relief for severe medical conditions. Products using cannabinoids…
Vomiting, nausea and diarrhoea are common chemotherapy side effects that can be so severe that patients may refuse further treatment.
Emergency Brake/Flickr
It’s unthinkable to give a placebo to someone to treat their cancer, but could we use one to treat chemotherapy’s well-known side effects? Unfortunately, we may never be able to answer this question because…
HIV is one of the deadliest viruses encountered by humans in recent history and will kill 1.5m people this year alone, compare this to Ebola, for example, which has killed less than 5,000 so far, and you…
Innovative new drugs to treat cancer frequently make the headlines, either due to great success or controversy, as pharmaceutical companies get lambasted for selling the drugs at too high a price for state…
Stopping breast cancer step by step.
Mircea Rosca/EPA
It is well established that faults in the BRCA2 gene (and the BRCA1 gene that prompted actress Angelina Jolie to undergo a mastectomy) increase the risk of breast, ovarian, prostate and other cancers…
Immune cells in the blood primarily defend us against infection. But we’re now learning that these cells can also keep us free from cancer. Patients with less efficient immune systems such as organ transplant…
Purple breast cancer cells self-destruct.
Khuloud T. Al-Jamal & Izzat Suffian
In the time that it will take you to read this article, millions of your body’s cells will have died via a self-destruct mechanism known as programmed cell death. This process is part of your body’s normal…
There may seem to be no connection between terrorism and cancer. But that is an oversight. If considered closely, it is easy to see that both exhibit loss of control present in “normal” conditions and…