Cancer sucks

cnx37 · 03-02-2015, 04:37 PM

Advice - ascertained from personal experience. I had chemo once - never again - radiotherapy - 35 times. From the after-effects of radiotherapy, I am in terrible pain eg 27 extractions; cannot chew; no dentures. I am in BIG trouble!

**PeeCoffee** · 05-02-2015, 05:48 AM

CNX...breathe deeply...knowing you are alive.
That comes first and foremost. Assuredly, easier said than experienced.

Contact your physician or the hospitals nutritionist and get your strength one way or another.

2015 is going to be another year for you to enjoy...with or without dentures.

cnx37 · 05-02-2015, 08:00 AM

OK if you wish to live. How long must one endure pain?

**Jesus Jones** · 05-02-2015, 08:47 AM

Originally Posted by cnx37

Advice - ascertained from personal experience. I had chemo once - never again - radiotherapy - 35 times. From the after-effects of radiotherapy, I am in terrible pain eg 27 extractions; cannot chew; no dentures. I am in BIG trouble!

My understanding is chem and radio stimulates cancer cells. Have you look at changing your diet and natural alternatives?

Avoid starch based food such as rice which cancer feeds on.

People put too much faith in the medical industry regarding cancer. It's a huge money earner!

Either way it won't hurt to look for other options.

Cancer: Forbidden Cures | Natural Cancer Treatment

cnx37 · 05-02-2015, 08:50 AM

I eat vegetable soup & milk only - 6 years now.

**Jesus Jones** · 05-02-2015, 08:51 AM

Originally Posted by cnx37

I eat vegetable soup & milk only - 6 years now.

Raw or cooked?

**Latindancer** · 05-02-2015, 08:53 AM

Hey cnx37 :

Listen up, dude ! Read this article about the latest discovery to do with chronic pain. It's really exciting and will give you real hope.

It seems that chronic pain often feeds on itself, and you need to break that chain.

In the last Weekend Australian newspaper, in the magazine section, there was a fascinating article by Dr Norman Doidge. (He has previously written a book about brain plasticity....it's ability to change itself). I have copied the newspaper article here :

MICHAEL Moskowitz is a psychiatrist turned pain specialist who has often been forced to use himself as a guinea pig. Burly, buoyant and tall, Moskowitz looks a [at]decade younger than his 60-odd years. He wears oval John Lennon glasses, has slightly long, greying curls of hair, a moustache and a beatnik’s soul patch beneath his lower lip. He smiles a lot.
I first saw Moskowitz in Hawaii, where he was moderating a serious and sober panel at the American Academy of Pain Medicine. He was in a suit, but he seemed too big a personality, too boyish, to be wearing one. A few hours later, on the beach, wearing shorts and wild colours, he was unconstrained, joking. We got acquainted and everything about him – his love of singing and playing the guitar, his engaging manner and youthful voice – suggested he was still very much a creature of the happy-go-lucky world of the 1960s in which he came of age.

Not so. Moskowitz spends most of his time immersed in the chronic pain of others. Their agony is unknown to most people, in part because they are often so drained by their pain that they stop wasting what little energy they have to express distress to those who can’t help them. Chronic pain may be invisible on a patient’s face, or it can give its victim a drawn, ghostly presence, because it sucks the life out of a person.
Moskowitz and another psychiatrist turned pain specialist, Robert Hines, set up a pain clinic in Sausalito, California, which treats patients with “intractable pain”: those who have tried all other treatments, including all known drugs, “nerve blocks” (regular anaesthetic injections) and acupuncture. “We are the end of the line,” Moskowitz says. “We are where people come to die with their pain.”

Moskowitz came to pain medicine after working for years as a psychiatrist. He has all the professional and scholarly credentials: he was on the examination council for the American Board of Pain Medicine (setting the exams for doctors in pain medicine); he is a former chairman of the education committee of the [at]American Academy of Pain Medicine; and he has an advanced psychiatric fellowship in psychosomatic medicine. But Moskowitz became a world leader in the use of neuroplasticity – using the brain’s own structure and functioning in response to activity and mental experience – for treating pain only after making some discoveries while treating himself.

In 1994, while water-skiing with his daughters, big-kid Moskowitz was speeding, splashing, and pounding at 60km/h in an inflated inner tube when he flipped over and hit the water with his head bent backward. The resulting pain persisted. It was often an 8/10, on many days making it impossible for him to work. (Pain is rated from 0/10 to 10/10 – 10 is being dropped into boiling oil.) It soon dominated his life as no pain ever had. Morphine and other heavy-duty painkillers, and all the known treatments – physical therapy, traction (stretching the neck), massage, self-hypnosis, heat, ice, rest, anti-inflammatory drugs – barely touched it. That pain haunted and tormented him for 13 years, becoming more severe as time passed.
He was 57 when he hit rock bottom with his neck pain and began researching the discovery that the brain was neuroplastic and relating it to pain. The idea that chronic pain was caused by a neuroplastic event of the brain had been proposed by the German physiologist Manfred Zimmermann in 1978, but as neuroplasticity would remain generally unaccepted for another 25 years, Zimmermann’s idea was hardly known, and its applications to treat pain unexplored. Acute pain alerts us to bodily injury or disease by sending a signal to the brain, saying: “This is where you are hurt – attend to it.” But sometimes an injury affects both our bodily [at]tissues and the neurons in our pain system, including those in the brain and spinal cord, resulting in neuropathic pain (sometimes called central pain because the brain and spinal cord together make up our central nervous system).

Neuropathic pain occurs because of the behaviour of neurons that make up our “brain maps” for pain. The external areas of our body are represented in our brain, in specific processing areas, called brain maps. Touch a part of the body’s surface and a specific part of the brain map, devoted to that spot, will start to fire. When the neurons in our pain maps get damaged, they fire incessant false alarms, making us believe the problem is in our body when it is mostly in our brain. Long after the body has healed, the pain system is still firing. The acute pain has developed an afterlife: it becomes chronic pain.
Moskowitz defines chronic pain as “learnt pain”. It not only indicates illness; it is itself an illness. The body’s alarm system is stuck in the “on” position because the person has been unable to remedy the cause of an acute pain and the central nervous system has become damaged. “Once chronicity sets in, the pain is much more difficult to treat.”

Wishing to take charge of his own pain, in 2007 Moskowitz read 15,000 pages of neuroscience. He wanted to better understand the laws of neuroplastic change and put them into practice. He learnt that not only can one strengthen circuits between brain areas by getting these areas to fire at the same time, but that one can weaken connections by making sure areas don’t fire in synch. Could he, by fiddling with the timing of input to his brain, start to weaken links that had formed in his pain maps? He also learnt that in our use-it-or-lose-it brain there is an ongoing competition for cortical real estate, because the activities the brain performs regularly take up more and more space in the brain by “stealing” resources from other areas.

He drew three pictures of the brain that [at]summarised what he had learnt. The first was a picture of the brain in acute pain, with 16 areas showing activity. The second was of the brain in chronic pain, showing those same areas firing but expanded over a larger area of the brain, and the third picture was of the brain when it is not [at]registering pain at all. As he analysed the areas that fire in chronic pain, he observed that many of those areas also process thoughts, sensations, images, memories, movements, emotions and beliefs when they are not processing pain. That observation explained why, when we are in pain, we can’t concentrate or think well; why we have sensory problems and often can’t tolerate certain sounds or light; why we can’t move more gracefully; and why we can’t control our emotions very well, become irritable and have emotional outbursts. The areas that regulate these activities have been hijacked to process the pain signal.

Moskowitz’s inspiration was simple: what if he could use competitive plasticity in his favour? What if, when his pain started – instead of allowing those areas to be pirated and “taken over” by pain processing – he “took them back” to their original main activities, by forcing himself to perform those activities, no matter how intense the pain was? What if, when he was in pain, he could try to override the natural [at]tendency to retreat, lie down, rest, stop thinking and nurse himself?
Moskowitz decided the brain needed a [at]counterstimulation. He would force those brain areas to process anything but pain, to weaken his chronic pain circuits. Years as a pain medicine specialist had fixed in his mind the key brain areas he was targeting. Each of them could process pain and do other mental functions, and he listed what each did other than process pain, so he would be prepared to do those things while he was in pain.

For instance, a part of the brain called the somatosensory area processes much of the body’s sensory input, including pain, vibration and touch. What if, while he felt pain, he was to flood himself with vibration and touch sensations? Might those sensations prevent the [at]somatosensory areas from being able to process pain? Moskowitz knew that when a particular brain area is processing acute pain, only about five per cent of the neurons in that area are dedicated to processing pain. In chronic pain, the constant firing and wiring together of neurons lead to an increase, so that 15 to 25 per cent of the neurons in the area are now dedicated to pain processing. So about 10 to 20 per cent of neurons get pirated to process chronic pain. Those were what he would have to steal back.

In April 2007 he put this theory into practice. He decided that he would first use visual activity to overpower the pain. A huge part of the brain is devoted to visual processing, and it couldn’t hurt to have it on his side in this competition. He knew of two brain areas that process visual information and pain, the posterior cingulate (which helps us to visually imagine where things are in space) and the posterior parietal lobe (which processes visual input). Each time he got an attack of pain he immediately began visualising. But what? He visualised the very brain maps he had drawn, to remind himself that the brain can really change, so he’d stay motivated. First he would visualise his picture of the brain in chronic pain – and observed how much the map in chronic pain had expanded neuroplastically. Then he would imagine the areas of firing shrinking, so that they looked like the brain when there was no pain. “I had to be relentless – even more relentless than the pain signal itself,” he said. He greeted every twinge of pain with an image of his pain map shrinking, knowing that he was forcing his posterior cingulate and posterior parietal lobes to process a visual image.

In the first three weeks he thought he noticed a very small decrease in pain and he doggedly continued to apply the technique, telling himself to “disconnect the network, shrink the map”. After a month he was getting the hang of it and applying the technique so conscientiously that he never let a pain spike occur without doing some visualisation or other mental activity to oppose it. It worked. By six weeks, the pain between his shoulders in his back and near his shoulder blades had completely disappeared, never to return. By four months, he was having his first totally pain-free periods throughout his neck. And within a year he was almost always pain-free, his average pain 0/10. If he had a brief relapse (usually from his neck being in a weird position, after a long drive, or having the flu), he was able to get his pain down to 0 in a few minutes. His life was totally changed after 13 years of chronic pain. During those 13 years, his average pain had been 5/10, but could range up as high as 8/10 even on medication, and even his best days were 3/10.

Moskowitz started to share his discovery with his patients. His first “neuroplastic” patient was Jan Sandin, a nurse in her 40s at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, California. An accident at work had left all five of her lumbar (lower back) discs damaged, and the bottom one slipped and pressed against a nerve root. Over the next few years she was given all the usual treatments for pain, including physiotherapy and heavy-duty opioid medications. Nothing helped, and the pain became chronic. Surgeons told her there was too much damage in her lower back to operate. After several brave attempts to return to work she was declared disabled. She felt her life was over.

By the time she got to Moskowitz, she had been disabled with chronic pain for a decade. Moskowitz worked conventionally with her for five years, using heavy-duty painkillers; then, in June 2007, he introduced her to the idea of [at]training herself using his neuroplastic technique. He showed her his three pictures of the brain and told her that she had to be more relentless than the pain in focusing on them. He asked her first to look at the pictures, then put them down and visualise them, while thinking about transforming her brain into the no-pain version.

“He told me to look at the brain pictures seven times a day. But I sat in the massage chair and I looked at them all day long, because I had nothing else to do. I would visualise the pain centres firing, and then I thought about where my pain was coming from in my back. Then I would visualise how it went into the spine and then into my brain – but with no pain centres firing. In those first two weeks, I had moments when there was no pain… It wasn’t profound, because I felt, Oh, it’s not going to last. Then I thought, Oh, it’s back again – don’t get your hopes up.
“By the third week I was starting to have a couple of minutes a day without chronic pain. By the end of the third week, the time without pain seemed to increase. But it happened for such a short period of time that, honestly, I never really thought it would go away. By the fourth week, the pain-free periods were up to 15 minutes to half an hour. I thought, This is going to go away.” And it did. Next, she started going off all her medications, terrified the pain would return, but it didn’t. “I wondered, Is it a placebo? But the pain still hasn’t come back. It has never come back.”

What Moskowitz has added to our understanding of this ability of the mind to eliminate a particular pain is that constant mental practice is necessary to strengthen this ability and change the firing of the brain in a way that is sustained. Unlike medication or placebo, the neuroplastic technique allows patients to reduce its use over time, once their networks have rewired.
The effects last. Moskowitz has patients who have kept their gains for five years. Many of his relatively pain-free patients still have damage in their bodies, which can, on occasion, trigger acute pain. He thinks that once they have learnt and practised the technique over hundreds of hours, their unconscious mind takes over the task of blocking pain by using competitive plasticity. When it doesn’t, they can still use the spike of pain as the signal to consciously use competitive plasticity to do more rewiring. “I don’t believe in pain management anymore,” says Moskowitz. “I believe in trying to cure persistent pain.”

He has helped patients with a wide range of chronic pain syndromes to diminish their pain, including those with chronic low-back pain from nerve injury and inflammatory damage, diabetic neuropathy, some cancer pain, abdominal pain, neck degeneration pain, amputation, trauma to the brain and spinal cord, pelvic floor pain, inflammatory bowel, irritable bowel, bladder pain, arthritis, lupus, trigeminal [at]neuralgia, [at]multiple sclerosis pain, post-[at]infectious pain, nerve injuries, neuropathic pain, some central pain, phantom limb pain, degenerative disc [at]disease, pain from failed back surgery and pain from nerve root injury, among others. I met many of his patients who had either come off their medications or radically reduced them, so that they have far fewer side-[at]effects. Patients have had successes in all these pain syndromes, but only when they were able to do the relentless mental work required.

One of Moskowitz’s most important insights is that the new opioid narcotics, so popular for pain treatment, have actually made many pain problems worse, because neither the drug companies nor many physicians take into account the role of neuroplasticity in pain. Often within days or weeks, patients become “tolerant” to such a drug: the size of the initial dose loses its effect, so they need ever more medication, or they experience “breakthrough pain” while on the drug. But as the dose is increased, so too is the danger of addiction and overdose. To better block pain, drug companies invented “long-acting” opioids, such as [at]OxyContin, a long-acting morphine. People with chronic pain would often be placed on OxyContin-like drugs for life.

The brain makes its own opioid-like substances to block pain, and the manufactured drugs supplement them by attaching to the brain’s own opioid receptors. As long as scientists believed that the brain couldn’t change, they never anticipated that bombarding the [at]opioid receptors with opioid medications could do harm. However, says Moskowitz, “once we saturate all our God-given receptors, the brain produces new ones.” It adapts to being inundated by long-term opioids by becoming less sensitive to them – and thus patients become more sensitive to pain, and more dependent on their drugs, which can make their chronic pain worse.
Once he made his discoveries, he slowly began to wean many patients from their long-term opioids. A key to success was to lower the dose very slowly, thereby giving the neuro[at]plastic brain the time it needed to adapt to being without drugs, so the patient wouldn’t experience any “breakthrough pain”. Tapering slowly, down to 50 to 80 per cent of the [at]original dose, could break the cycle of opioid-[at]induced pain sensitivity.

Moskowitz, Sandin and others were restored by understanding how to use competitive plasticity. Many clinicians would, at that point, have focused the rest of their career on teaching visualisation, because so many patients responded to it. But not all did, and that left Moskowitz dissatisfied. Perhaps some needed approaches other than visualisation to compete with pain.
He was helped by Marla Golden, an emergency physician who specialises in chronic pain, whom he met in 2008. Golden also trained in osteopathy, a hands-on practice using touch, sound and vibration. They have pioneered a true mind-brain-body approach to chronic pain in which patients receive simultaneous neuroplastic input from the mind and body to influence the brain. Golden’s hands are so sensitive, Moskowitz says, she sometimes seems to “see” with them, finding problem areas and rapid ways to ease chronic pain. I have followed a number of their patients and seen remarkable progress.

As for Jan Sandin, who was cured in 2009, I returned to visit her in 2011. Her chronic pain syndrome had not returned and she looked younger than she had in 2009. Today, she continues to be pain-free, knowing that her relentless application of her mind in those days – when she was confined to a chair, immobilised, depressed and suicidal – was the best investment of mental energy she ever made.
The Brain’s Way of Healing by Norman Doidge (Scribe, $35)

Cookies must be enabled. | The Australian

cnx37 · 05-02-2015, 09:49 AM

You & Moskowitz MUST know - I know nuffin'!

**ENT** · 05-02-2015, 10:40 AM

^^ Yeh, but how does all that sort out the pain in your big toe?

**ENT** · 05-02-2015, 02:02 PM

Originally Posted by cnx37

I eat vegetable soup & milk only - 6 years now.

Add 3 tbs oats and 3 tbs whey powder to a mix of 1 tbs gelatine, 2 oz crushed mixed raw nuts, 1 tbs bran, 1 tbs wheatgerm. Add milk or preferably accidophilus yoghurt.

Stir/..(or blend the shite out of it)

Season and flavour to taste. (Avoid all processed foods if possible, try growing your own yoghurt or find a local yoghurt maker)

Drink slowly.

Two of those a day is about 66% of your daily protein and callory needs,

Raw veges through a blender or juice extractor, I use the fibre from the juicer to make a carrot/apple cake, or to thicken a stew or curry.

Bean sprouts, any seeds, eat them raw as they're just pushing out their second set of leaves, alive and tender, no need for cooking, into the mortar if need be.

Snack away on any raw fruits and veges.

Get onto 1.5 gm Nicotinic Acid, (Vit B3) < 3gm daily along with high dose Vit C, <30 gm per day in 20 minute doses (optimum)...which is as much Ascorbic acid powder as will cover your little fingernail....every 20 mins, or spaced out frequent doses with water and or milk.

Vitamin C doesn't last long in the body, about 20 mins before it's excreted.

But you're still short on the protein levels, so get a big drink of whey and yoghurt, flavoured garlic or honey, or fruit, etc.

Then you've got all the protein necessary to maintain your body, and all the carbohydrates (about <30% of diet)

Walk 2 miles a day, preferably up and down hilly roads 100 metres away from dense diesel fumes, with hand-grips, squeezing rhythmically with your pace.

Get a bicycle tube(or three

) and use it as a resistance band, fasten it to anything sturdy, or just use both arms and feet. Use the floor. Use 2 litre liquid/milk containers with handles as weights, 3 x2 =6 l =6k, another 3 = two sets of weights @ 6k each, all tied up with a bicycle tube.

Play with that.

You'll put on a few kilos of lean muscle mass and lose a similar weight of LDL in 3-4 months.

The combination of all the essential amino acids (contained in whey),a good organic diet which includes fish and a variety of dairy and vegetable products, containing supplementary minerals and vitamins, with a daily exercise program or regime/practice/habit, allows necessary nutrients to be used easily, providing one's p/H level is around 6-7(neutral).

Diseases don't thrive in an alkaline environment, they cease.

An acid environment (<6) fosters disease, including cancer, an age related disease along with cardio-vascular problems, arthritis, alzheimers.

You can get p/H test strips of litmus paper at most pharmacies.
Increased dosage of VitB3 Nicotinic Acid was found to reduce incidences of all the above mentioned diseases, including reducing cholesterol levels and balancing insulin by reducing insulin resistance.

Read about it.

Good luck, but will is paramount.

**S Landreth** · 21-02-2015, 04:25 AM

New Breathalyzer Device May One Day Diagnose Lung Cancer

In the United States alone, there will be over 158,000 deaths due to lung cancer this year; over a quarter of all cancer deaths. Part of the reason this type of cancer is so devastating is because the lung tissue is extremely delicate, which makes it easier for cancer to take root, and symptoms are not caught until the disease has been given a chance to advance. A new paper published in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments describes work by a team of researchers from China who have developed a breathalyzer-like device to detect lung cancer in its earliest stages via certain volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Though it is still early in development, this device could save many lives in the future as an early diagnostic tool.

"Our results show that the device can discriminate different kinds and concentrations of cancer related volatile organic compounds with a nearly 100 percent accurate rate," lead author Jin-can Lei said in a press release. "This would also be a rapid method in that the entire detection process in our experiment only takes about 20 minutes.”

As a patient breathes into the device, a gas chamber analyzes the air. The device detects four specific VOCs that are connected to lung cancer: styrene, isoprene, p-xylene, and hexanal. The device is even able to tease out concentrations of these VOCS that are as low as 50 parts per billion.

Lung cancer screening is traditionally expensive and time-consuming as it requires the use of CT scans. However, switching to a diagnostic device like the one proposed in this paper would be much easier and faster, and the results have been fairly accurate so far.

“[G]iven a complete fluorescent-image database of all lung cancer related gases, this device could be used to identify and quantify various gases characteristic of lung cancer from people's exhaled air, " co-author Chang-jun Hou added. "This may lead to a simple, rapid breathalyzer for early diagnosis of lung cancer.”

Moving forward, the team will refine the algorithm used by the device in order to more accurately examine the molecular fingerprint produced by the VOCs. In the future, this breathalyzer might not only be able to detect the presence of lung cancer, but may even help to identify the stage of disease as well.

"The experiment shows that the fluorescent cross-responsive sensor can accurately distinguish the four cancer-related gases and discriminate the gas concentrations, ranging from 50 to 500 parts per billion," Lei explained.

**Sumocakewalk** · 10-03-2015, 10:38 AM

We lost the significant other's mother to cancer yesterday.

She initially was diagnosed with breast cancer about 4 years ago and went through a mastectomy at the time. About 5 months ago she went through another mastectomy, but by this time the cancer had spread to her liver.

The liver cancer was determined to be inoperable and by 6 weeks ago her abdomen had swelled up to such an extent that she looked like she was in the latter stages of a pregnancy. Two and a half weeks ago we brought her to the hospital because she was experiencing severe pain from pressure related to the abdominal swelling. After draining the fluid we took her back home.

Nine days ago her condition had worsened to the point that her lungs were affected and they had filled up with fluid as well, making breathing very difficult. We brought her to the hospital again and admitted her this time. Her lungs were drained by inserting a syringe through the back of her rib cage. I was surprised at the amount of fluid they pulled from her lungs and estimate that about a liter and a half of fluid was removed. A short while later, the fluid from her abdominal cavity was also drained.

Over the course of the next five days, her condition rapidly worsened. She began taking doses of morphine to help relieve the pain, which helped her deal with that, but her appetite was diminished to the point where she was taking in very little food, while still being able to drink fluids on her own.

By last Thursday, she was in an increasing state of distress whereby she could not sleep and rolled around fittingly while her breathing, which was being aided by oxygen, was rapid and shallow. At this point the doctor indicated she only had two or three days left. She was still coherent enough to let it be known that she wanted to leave the hospital, so a decision was made to take her home for her final days.

At home she seemed more comfortable being in familiar surroundings with her family and neighbors. She got to the point where she stopped eating and in her last couple of days she was barely taking in any fluids. Yesterday at about 2:30PM she breathed her last.

Family and neighbors were quick to help with the funeral arrangements and we had the first night of the monk ceremony last evening. The funeral will go on for the next 6 days.

**palexxxx** · 10-03-2015, 11:00 AM

I'm sorry for your loss Sumo.

**Neverna** · 10-03-2015, 01:43 PM

My commiserations, Sumocakewalk.

So much cancer in the world.

**billy the kid** · 10-03-2015, 06:49 PM

Originally Posted by Jesus Jones

Avoid starch based food such as rice which cancer feeds on.

not sure where in the east was mentioned but
a lot of rice is grown in fields that have high levels of arsenic in the water
that are way above safe levels, 7 times
making it carcinogenic .

**beazalbob69** · 10-03-2015, 07:53 PM

Wife's Aunt diagnosed with stomach cancer I believe about a week ago. Thought she had kidney stones. Went for the operation to remove and when they opened her up found tumors everywhere instead. She came home today. Don't know how long shes got but docs said they couldn't do anything. 51 years old. 2 years since we lost my MIL to liver cancer from Hep B. She was only 55. Sad times for the wife's family.

**Latindancer** · 19-03-2015, 11:14 AM

Supercharged chemo: Killing cancer 20 times faster

Australian researchers are celebrating a major cancer breakthrough, which could make treatments faster, more effective, and less painful.

A new drug called Anisina is expected to kill cancer cells 20 times faster than existing medications, reducing chemotherapy treatment times, and side effects for patients.

Researchers say they are confident Anisina will work on almost all cancers.

University of New South Wales oncologist Peter Gunning has spent decades working on his theory of attacking the skeleton of cancer cells.

Now it appears his dedication has paid off.

“This is my wildest hope that we could achieve something on this scale,” Professor Gunning said.

Anisina was developed to work on its own but researchers found it also worked to make the most widely used chemotherapy and anti-cancer drugs more effective.

Traditionally many cancer treatments have targeted cancer cell architecture, however, they have only been partially successful in destroying the structures.

“This new drug has been specifically designed to target the bit the other drugs cannot,” Professor Gunning said.

“Think about a cancer cell as a building - if you take away the scaffolding the entire building collapses.

“We're doing exactly that to the cancer cell."

Researchers have tested Anisina on mice with aggressive neuroblastoma cancer cells, and are now confident it can treat most forms of cancer and leukaemia, without damaging the rest of the body.

By targeting cancer cells in isolation it could mean less chemotherapy and fewer side effects, especially for children.

Novogen researchers, Graham Kelly and Justine Stehn, said the drug represented a major advance.

“We see it eventually being used as a companion drug to what are the most commonly used drugs in cancer now,” Professor Kelly said.

Dr Stehn said Anisina represented a true “wow” moment.

“…[We] weren't expecting it to work quite so well, it actually blew our socks off to be honest,” she said.

Human trials are expected to begin next year but it could be as long as three years before Anisina hits the market.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/26705604...-times-faster/

**ENT** · 19-03-2015, 01:24 PM

Originally Posted by billy the kid

Originally Posted by Jesus Jones

Avoid starch based food such as rice which cancer feeds on.

not sure where in the east was mentioned but
a lot of rice is grown in fields that have high levels of arsenic in the water
that are way above safe levels, 7 times
making it carcinogenic .

Everywhere in N and NE Thailand. Arsenic and fluoride in Chiangmai and northwards to China,

Mekong carries all the Chinese overflow from Yunnan, lotsa pesticides, herbicides, fluoride and arsenic in the run off to Mekong, carefully controlled and irrigated into Lao, Cambodia, Vietnamese and Thai rice fields at Chinese appointed river flow and dam release times, so controlling not only the agriculture and economy of those countries, but also their health, and the health of those countries' rice consuming customers.

Is Spanish rice a safer choice health wise and politically? Probably.

**misskit** · 25-03-2015, 07:14 AM

Looking as though cancer has been plaguing humans since ancient times...

Oldest Evidence of Breast Cancer Found in Egyptian Skeleton

CAIRO—
A team from a Spanish university has discovered what Egyptian authorities are calling the world's oldest evidence of breast cancer in the 4,200-year-old skeleton of an adult woman.

Antiquities Minister Mamdouh el-Damaty said the bones of the woman, who lived at the end of the 6th Pharaonic Dynasty, showed "an extraordinary deterioration."

"The study of her remains shows the typical destructive damage provoked by the extension of a breast cancer as a metastasis," he said in a statement on Tuesday.

Despite being one of the world's leading causes of death today, cancer is virtually absent in archaeological records compared to other diseases - which has given rise to the idea that cancers are mainly attributable to modern lifestyles and to people living for longer.

But the finding, along with evidence reported last year by British researchers of metastatic cancer in a 3,000-year-old skeleton found in a tomb in modern Sudan, suggests cancer was around in the Nile Valley in ancient times.

The anthropological team from the University of Jaen said the Egyptian woman was an aristocrat from Elephantine, the country's southernmost town.

Her remains were discovered in the necropolis of Qubbet el-Hawa, west of the southern city of Aswan, the ministry said.

According to the World Health Organization's cancer research agency, new cancer cases rose to an estimated 14 million a year in 2012, a figure seen rising to 22 million within 20 years.

Oldest Evidence of Breast Cancer Found in Egyptian Skeleton

**S Landreth** · 19-04-2015, 10:44 PM

New blood test can predict future breast cancer

According to the World Health Organization, breast cancer is the most common cancer in women both in the developed and less developed world, and in the long term the scientists hope that the new method will lead to better prevention and early treatment of the disease.

"The method is better than mammography, which can only be used when the disease has already occurred. It is not perfect, but it is truly amazing that we can predict breast cancer years into the future," said Rasmus Bro, a professor of chemometrics in the Department of Food Science at University of Copenhagen. He stressed the method has been tested and validated only for a single population (cohort) and needs to be validated more widely before it can be used practically.

A new way of detecting diseases

Nevertheless, the method could create a paradigm shift in early diagnosis of breast cancer as well as other diseases.

"The potential is that we can detect a disease like breast cancer much earlier than today. This is important as it is easier to treat if you discover it early. In the long term, it will probably also be possible to use similar models to predict other diseases," said Lars Ove Dragsted, a professor of biomedicine in the Department of Nutrition, Exercise and Sports.

The method has been developed in cooperation with the Danish Cancer Society and the study was recently published in Metabolomics.

Food science showed the way

The researchers' approach to developing the method was adopted from food science, where it is used for control of complex industrial processes. Basically, it involves handling and analysing huge amounts of biological data in a holistic and explorative way. The researchers analysed all compounds a blood sample contains instead of - as is often done in health and medical science - examining what a single biomarker means in relation to a specific disease.

"When a huge amount of relevant measurements from many individuals is used to assess health risks - here breast cancer - it creates very high quality information. The more measurements our analyses contain, the better the model handles complex problems," continued Professor Rasmus Bro.

The model does not reveal anything about the importance of the single biomarkers in relation to breast cancer, but it does reveal the importance of a set of biomarkers and their interactions.

"No single part of the pattern is actually necessary nor sufficient. It is the whole pattern that predicts the cancer," said Professor Dragsted.

A metabolic blood profile describes the amounts of all compounds (metabolites) in our blood. The scientists measured metabolic blood profiles for this project. When you are in a pre-cancer state, the pattern for how certain metabolites are processed apparently changes.

While a mammography can detect newly developed breast cancer with a sensitivity of 75 per cent, the new metabolic blood profile is able to predict the likelihood of a woman developing breast cancer within the next two to five years with a sensitivity of 80 per cent.

Based on population study

The research is based on a population study of 57,000 people followed by the Danish Cancer Society over 20 years. The participants were first examined in 1994-96, during which time their weight and other measurements were recorded and they answered a questionnaire. They also provided a blood sample that was stored in liquid nitrogen.

The scientists used the 20-year-old blood samples and other available data from 400 women who were healthy when they were first examined but who were diagnosed with breast cancer two to seven years after providing the first sample, and from 400 women who did not develop breast cancer.

The method was also used to test a different dataset of women examined in 1997. Predictions based on the new set of data matched the first dataset, which indicates the validity of the model.

**Latindancer** · 02-05-2015, 02:55 PM

Scientists have found dramatic effects on risk factors for colon cancer when American and African volunteers swapped diets for just two weeks.
Western diets, high in protein and fat but low in fibre, are thought to raise colon cancer risk compared with African diets high in fibre and low in fat and protein.

The new study, published in Nature Communications today, confirms that a high fibre diet can substantially reduce risk, and shows that bacteria living in the gut play an important role in this effect.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0428125038.htm

**S Landreth** · 10-06-2015, 10:39 PM

Single dose of vaccine may prevent cervical cancer: researchers

A single vaccine shot, rather than the recommended triple dose, may be enough to protect women against cervical cancer, a study said on Wednesday.

If further work validates the findings, there could be major gains for campaigns to vaccinate young women in poor countries, the authors said.

The research looked at Cervarix, which with another vaccine, Gardasil, is being rolled out to shield young girls from the human papillomavirus (HPV) which causes cervical cancer.

Cervarix is a so-called bivalent vaccine, targeting two types of virus — HPV 16 and 18 — that together are to blame for about 70 percent of cases.

The vaccine was initially approved to be given in three doses over six months, although some countries have cautiously switched to a two-dose schedule.

The new research, published in the journal The Lancet Oncology, suggests that this easier regimen could be taken even further.

The authors reported on an aspect of two big trials to test Cervarix among 7,500 women in Costa Rica aged 18-25 and more than 18,500 women aged 15-25 in the Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Americas.

Women in these trials were randomly assigned to receiving either Cervarix in three doses, or a hepatitis A vaccine.

However, 543 of the women in the Cervarix group only received one dose, mainly because their vaccination was discontinued due to pregnancy.

Four years after the trial took place, the researchers checked the health of the volunteers.

They found there was no difference in cancer rates among those who had received Cervarix, regardless of the number of doses they had received.

The authors, led by Cosette Wheeler of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, call for a new randomised study to see if these findings hold true on a larger scale and beyond just four years.

If the good news is confirmed, the big beneficiaries would be poor countries.

Cervical cancer is notoriously called a “silent killer” of women. It is the fourth commonest cause of cancer among women, and tragically is often diagnosed too late.

“If one dose is sufficient, it could reduce vaccination and administration costs as well as improve uptake,” said co-author Aimee Kreimer of the US National Cancer Institute.

“This is especially important in less developed regions of the world, where more than 80 percent of cervical cancer cases occur.”

**Latindancer** · 15-07-2015, 05:45 PM

A molecule described as the "lynchpin" of cancer spread has been identified, paving the way to potentially life-saving treatments.
Targeting the protein DNA-PKcs could prevent the deadly spread of prostate cancer and possibly other cancers as well, scientists believe.
Metastasis, the migration of tumours away from their original site to vital organs such as the liver and brain, is usually what causes cancer to kill.
US lead scientist Dr Karen Knudsen, director of the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Centre at Thomas Jefferson University, said: "Finding a way to halt or prevent cancer metastasis has proven elusive. We discovered that a molecule called DNA-PKcs could give us a means of knocking out major pathways that control metastasis before it begins."
Before cancer spreads, tumours develop DNA mutations that make their cells more mobile and able to enter the bloodstream. The cells also become "sticky", which helps them anchor into new locations such as the bone, lungs, liver or brain.

The processes by which this happen are complex, involving many different biological pathways - but the new research suggests that just one molecule, DNA-PKcs, lies at the root of many of them.
The molecule is a type of enzyme known as a "repair kinase" that fixes broken or mutated DNA strands in cancer cells. Because of DNA-PKcs, defective cells that should normally self-destruct are kept alive.

Previous research has shown that the molecule helps drive treatment-resistance in prostate cancer by repairing damage to tumours caused by radiation and other therapies.
Dr Knudsen's team found that DNA-PKcs also seems to act as a master regulator of signalling networks that turn on the whole metastatic process.
It has effects that allow many cancer cell types to become mobile, and is involved in other other pathways responsible for cell migration and invasion.

In mice with human prostate cancer, blocking DNA-PKcs prevented the spread of tumours. Cancer growth in metastatic sites was reduced in animals with aggressive human tumours.
Further analysis of tissue samples from 232 prostate cancer patients revealed that spikes in kinase levels strongly predicted metastasis and poor outcomes.
DNA-PKcs was much more active in men with prostate cancer who had ceased to respond to hormone therapy.
"These results strongly suggest that DNA-PKcs is a master regulator of the pathways and signals that lead to the development of metastases in prostate cancer, and that high levels of DNA-PKcs could predict which early stage tumours may go on to metastasise," said Dr Knudsen.
The findings are reported in the journal Cancer Cell.
A drug that inhibits DNA-PKcs made by the pharmaceutical company Celgene is now being tested on patients with advanced solid tumours and leukaemia in an early-stage Phase 1 clinical trial.
The drug, code-named CC-115, suppresses both DNA-PKcs and another cancer-driving molecule.

"We are enthusiastic about the next step of clinical assessment for testing DNA-PKcs inhibitors in the clinic," Dr Knudsen added.
"A new trial will commence shortly using the Celgene CC-115 DNA-PKcs inhibitor. This new trial will be for patients advancing on standard of care therapies.
"Although the pathway to drug approval can take many years, this new trial will provide some insight into the effect of DNAP-PKcs inhibitors as anti-tumour agents.
"In parallel, using this kinase as a marker of severe disease may also help identify patients whose tumours will develop into aggressive metastatic disease, so that we can treat them with more aggressive therapy earlier.
"Given the role of DNA-PKcs in DNA repair as well as control of tumour metastasis, there will be challenges in clinical implementation - but this discovery unveils new opportunities for preventing or treating advanced disease."

https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/28810546...pin-of-cancer/

**birding** · 18-07-2015, 01:14 PM

I was diagnosed (in Thailand) with colo-rectal cancer in 2008 and after many tests and a lot of research on our part met with a Dr (surgeon) who was said to be a specialist. Asked him all the questions we had gleaned from our research and wasnt satisfied with his answers so looked around and found on the internet the CV's of several Dr's who were said to be the top in the specialty.

The No1 wasnt available so we contacted and met with one who was said to be the number 2 in the country at a private hospital in BKK and he told us he no longer operated due to his age and he introduced us to another surgeon who he recommended. He gave all the right answers and told us he was a military surgeon and could do the job either at the private hospital where we had met him or Pramonkutklau military hospital in BKK where he was based, the military option would be about half the price, we chose it.

Treatment started off with oral chemo and radiation to shrink the tumor which was diagnosed as advanced stage 2 or early stage 3 followed by an OP to remove the tumor and several lymph glands.
This was followed up with more chemo first by an injection that really knocked me back as it did the wallet as it cost 60.000b for one go. I said no more and went on an oral chemo which was much milder on the system.

After the OP I had a colostomy bag attached to the end of the small intestine to allow the repair of the colon and shortened rectum to heal, this for 3 months after which time it was removed by another small OP and the small intestine connecter back to the colon.
At this point I gave myself a problem by eating to much and ended up with a twisted bowel (small intestine) something I had heard makes you talk shit but is no joking matter.
Wont go into the treatment for that at this point but it was eventually sorted and now 7 years later after traveling to several countries and around Thailand I am feeling great, fit and healthy and keen to get out into the national parks and forests.

**misskit** · 18-07-2015, 01:29 PM

^ Great news you wrestled that bear and won. Happy travels.

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