08/06/07 Fitness plays a key role in battling cancer

• So. You get the worst news of your life: Cancer.You dutifully sign on for chemo, surgery, radiation. You also vow to eat better. More fruits and veggies, less saturated fat –- all that good stuff should tip the odds in your favor, right? There’s actually surprisingly little evidence that such dietary changes prolong survival -- except perhaps for colon cancer.

04/02/07 The balance between life and disease 

• Like many other Americans lately, I’ve found myself thinking hard about – and personally identifying with – the dilemma faced by Elizabeth Edwards and her husband, John, the former senator and would-be president. His career, her health. Not an easy balancing act.  Who should sacrifice for whom? How much?  Nobody wants to be – or live with – a martyr. But nobody wants to deal with – or watch a loved one deal with – cancer unsupported, either. Ultimately, everybody’s mental health counts – the sick partner’s, the healthy one’s, and the kids’.

01/22/07 How to cope with shock of cancer diagnosis

• Late last fall, Dartmouth Medical School researchers reported in the journal Cancer that all newly diagnosed breast cancer patients in their study experienced at least some level of distress, and nearly half met the criteria for a significant psychiatric disorder such as major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.

08/10/04 Optimism isn't the cure

• Nancy Achin Audesse, 45, knows a thing or two about serious illness and optimism. Audesse, executive director of the Massachusetts Board of Registration of Medicine, has had cancer four times: Hodgkin’s disease when she was 14, the first round of breast cancer at 33, the second bout (which included a relapse of the first, plus a whole new tumor) at 34 and melanoma at 37.

05/04/04 On the Verge of an Ovarian Cancer Test

• Judith Rubel, a former marketing specialist for a Boston-area hospital, seemed an unlikely candidate for ovarian cancer. She was healthy, fit and slim. She had no family history of the disease. Besides, ovarian cancer was pretty rare -- only one woman out of 59 gets the disease over a lifetime.

09/23/03 - Parents Fight for Experimental Drugs

• Two and a half years ago, several months before she died, Abigail Burroughs, a 21-year old senior at the University of Virginia, sat with her father as chemotherapy dripped, once again, into her body. Together, they mapped out a plan they hoped would save Abigail’s life, and the lives of other desperately-ill people.

08/12/03 - Sorting out the Hype and Hope of Targeted Therapies

• Dean Gordanier is a tax lawyer, fitness buff, father of three and, at age 54, a veteran of the roller-coaster ride of hope and despair that is becoming a way of life for growing numbers of people with cancer, thanks to the promise, and the heartbreak, of a new generation of cancer drugs.

07/01/03 - "Chemo Brain" Leaves Patients at a Loss

• She had been, she says,  “a smart cookie,” a university grad who had built up a successful business in Toronto as a marketing consultant. But several years ago, when she was 38, she had chemotherapy for breast cancer and wound up with a bad case of “chemo brain” --- cognitive problems such as trouble with thinking and memory that many cancer patients, and a growing number of doctors, believe may be related to chemotherapy.

04/08/03 New Approach Could Reduce the Need for Chemotherapy

• There’s a revolution brewing in the diagnosis of cancer that could dramatically change how doctors figure out which tumors are truly life-threatening – and need chemotherapy -- and which are not. In the Netherlands, the new tool - called by various names, including gene expression profiling - is expected to be available for some women with breast cancer as soon as May. In the US, it could be several years before the technique is routinely available.

03/25/03 Telomerase - a Promising Cancer Drug Stuck in Patent Hell?

• Molecular biologists aren’t a particularly grumpy lot, but they are grumbling these days that corporate interests – particularly those of the California-based Geron Corp. – may be stifling development of a promising new class of anti-cancer drugs called telomerase inhibitors. Telomerase is a weird enzyme – part protein (called hTERT), part RNA (hTR). Its job is to restore a tiny bit of DNA at the ends of chromosomes.

01/14/03 New Trial to Detect Early Lung Cancer

• Sadly enough, it often seems to take a celebrity patient to get the rest of us to sit up and take notice of certain diseases, especially diseases  in which the patient’s own behavior contributes to the risk. This time, the celebrity is an active, young mother, Kara Kennedy , 42, the daughter of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). And the disease is lung cancer – the biggest cancer killer in the country, whose primary cause is smoking - an addiction, to be sure, but a potentially modifiable behavior as well.

10/08/02 - Oral Cancer Poses Growing Threat

• Patricia Di Carlo, 49, a former smoker who lives in Malden and works as a legal secretary, discovered what she thought was a harmless canker sore on her tongue eight years ago. Her dentist thought it was nothing, too, but it turned out to be oral cancer which just might be enough to scare anyone who still chews tobacco or smokes and drinks heavily out of denial forever.

02/12/02 - Better Ways to Scan the Colon

• “We Cater to Cowards,” proclaims the cheery little sign at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, where countless cowards (including this one) go for what may well be everyone’s least favorite test: colon cancer screening.

07/17/01- When Illness Tests Marriage Vows

• Several years ago, Dr. Michael J. Glantz, a brain cancer specialist, was struck by what appeared to be an extraordinary number of divorces and separations among his patients, who had primary brain tumors that were expected to kill them in 15 months

10/24/00 - Stressed out

• Burned by lawsuits and low pay, radiologists are quitting, making women wait longer to find if they have breast cancer for or years, breast cancer specialists have quite rightly touted mammograms as the best way to detect tumors while they're small and highly treatable.

02/22/00 - HPV test is urged by some

• The Pap smear, used to detect cervical cancer, is done 50 million times each year in the United States and remains one of the best cancer-detection tools doctors have. In the 50 years since it was introduced in the United States, the death rate from cervical cancer has dropped by 70 percent. In poor countries that don't yet do Pap screening, cervical cancer is a leading cause of cancer death in women.

12/13/99 - Detecting, treating bladder cancer early

• Four years ago, Ellen Pinzur, a Cambridge woman who had been a lifetime smoker, got a most unwelcome surprise. When she went to her gynecologist for a routine exam, he suspected she had a fibroid, a benign growth in the uterus. He sent her for an ultrasound. Sure enough, she did have a fibroid. But, that was the good news.

11/18/99 - Thalidomide, once a pariah drug, finds a new life in cancer therapy

• Thalidomide, once banned in the United States after it caused serious birth defects in 10,000 babies worldwide four decades ago, can produce dramatic improvements in people with a cancer of the bone marrow, according to a study being published today.

11/08/99 - Cutting-edge drugs a must in treating rare cancer

• With any serious disease, it's obviously a good idea to find the best doctor - and the best hospital - you can. But with ovarian cancer, a rare disease that strikes 25,000 women a year, kills nearly 15,000, and is almost impossible to detect early - it's absolutely essential.

08/09/99 - Odd remedy said to slow deadly cancer

• Four years ago, Betty Frizzell, a retired schoolteacher from Cookeville, Tenn., was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest malignancies there is. Normally, people with advanced tumors, like Frizzell's, live only about five months after they are diagnosed. Frizzell, now 64, is thriving on a diet of fruits and vegetables plus a regimen of dietary supplements including pancreatic enzymes and -- believe it or not -- coffee enemas.

07/12/99 - Cancer patients battle fatigue

• By this time Dr. Candace Jennings, 50, an orthopedic surgeon from Ipswich, figured she'd be back to work and blessed again with plenty of energy for her husband and sons, 7 and 13. But even though it's been a year since she finished chemotherapy and radiation for breast cancer, she's only got half the energy she used to have. She tried to go back to work but had to give it up -- ``the energy demand was too much,'' she says. And her doctors, while sympathetic, haven't offered much hope. 

06/07/99 - Cancer treatment needs emotional rescue

• Last week, Harvard researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that 28 percent of newly-diagnosed breast cancer patients turn to complementary therapies such as massage, herbs, relaxation techniques, and self-help groups -- even though they had never used so-called alternative medicine before. In fact, the women most likely to turn to such therapies, the researchers found, were the ones who suffered the most anxiety and depression in the first three months after diagnosis.

05/17/99 - Drugs could eradicate a fatal cancer

• For years now, the incidence of some types of lymphoma -- the cancer that killed former US Sen. Paul Tsongas, Jackie Onassis and Jordan's King Hussein -- has been among the fastest rising of all cancers, and no one is quite sure why. The death rate has been increasing, too. This year, 64,000 Americans will get lymphoma and 27,000 will die from it.

03/29/99 - Hopes dim for controversial breast cancer treatment

• Convinced by doctors that bone marrow transplantation offered the best chance at survival, thousands of women with breast cancer have agreed to the controversial procedure -- despite the lack of proof that it could save, or even prolong, their lives more than standard therapy. Indeed, so many women -- about 5,000 women a year -- now undergo the treatment, arguably the most devastating procedure in modern medicine, that breast cancer has become the most common reason for transplants. 

03/08/99 - New drugs fight sores from cancer treatment

• The worst part of Colleen Combes' breast cancer treatment three years ago, besides losing her hair, was the awful mouth sores caused by chemotherapy. These ulcers ``were like canker sores that had broken open, only much worse. They were everywhere -- on my tongue, the inside of my lips, my cheeks. It was very painful. I couldn't eat. It was difficult to talk,'' says Combes, a 41-year old Rockland woman currently on leave from her job in a law firm.

05/04/98 - Skin cancer hits many, but it can be very curable

• Sally Loring, 70, a retired volunteer for the historical society in Manchester-by-the-Sea, is one lucky lady. Seven years ago, while on vacation in Australia and New Zealand, Loring knocked the head off a mole that she'd had for decades but that hadn't been checked by a doctor for four years. The headless mole wouldn't heal.

10/27/97 - Brain tumor - It is still perhaps the most dreaded diagnosis, but methods of treating it are improving

• Jordan Fieldman was a 23-year-old first year student at Harvard Medical School when he was told that a brain tumor would probably kill him before the year was out. For five years, he'd had ``horrendous headaches'' that were written off as stress, he says. He'd also had trouble seeing what was on the blackboard since his undergraduate days as a neuroscience major at Harvard.

05/05/97 - For many with cancer the problem is fatigue

• You might think, to hear about Dr. Wendy S. Harpham's life, that it's perfectly obvious why she's always exhausted. For one thing, she and her husband run a very busy household in Dallas with three kids, ages 8, 10, and 12.

02/10/97 - Testicular cancer: scary but almost curable

• David Cohan, a 34-year-old senior analyst at a Boston real estate investment trust company, says he ``never wanted to be the poster child for testicular cancer.'' ``But if it will help to save some lives and turn my experience into something much more positive, I'd like to do this,'' says Cohan.

04/01/96 - Trying everything - more and more cancer patients seek out ancient Chinese remedies to augment modern medicine

• For Ingrid Schorr, 36, an actor and writer who lives in Arlington, the bomb dropped last September: a totally unexpected diagnosis of breast cancer. The diagnosis was traumatic enough, she says, but she also felt ``desperate and sad'' about having to undergo chemotherapy. She knew it would leave her weak and drained.

01/22/96 - Fine-tuning the pap smear with technology

• The humble Pap test, a screening test so good that American women now die of cervical cancer at only one-fifth the rate of 50 years ago, is one of the best tools in modern medicine. Unlike mammograms, which detect breast cancers at an early stage, Pap tests spot abnormalities in cervical cells even before they become cancer.