Tuesday 7 May 2013
Male Breast CancerSign Ribbon cells Horoscope Symbol Tattoos Research Zodiac Sign Ribbon Tattoos
Male Breast Cancer Biography
Source(google.com.pk)
Male breast cancer (MBC) is an uncommon and relatively uncharacterised disease accounting for <1% of all breast cancers. A significant proportion occurs in families with a history of breast cancer and in particular those carrying BRCA2 mutations. Here we describe clinicopathological features and genomic BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation status in a large cohort of familial MBCs.
Methods
Cases (n=60) intiluded 3 BRCA1 and 25 BRCA2 mutation carries, and 32 non-BRCA1/2 (BRCAX) carriers with strong family histories of breast cancer. The cohort was examined with respect to mutation status, clinicopathological parameters including TNM staging, grade, histological subtype and intrinsic phenotype.
Results
Compared to the general population, MBC incidence was higher in all subgroups. In contrast to female breast cancer (FBC) there was greater representation of BRCA2 tumours (41.7% vs 8.3%, p=0.0008) and underrepresentation of BRCA1 tumours (5.0% vs 14.4%, p=0.0001). There was no correlation between mutation status and age of onset, disease specific survival (DSS) or other clincopathological factors. Comparison with sporadic MBC studies showed similar clinicopathological features. Prognostic variables affecting DSS included primary tumour size (p=0.003, HR:4.26 95%CI 1.63-11.11), age (p=0.002, HR:4.09 95%CI 1.65-10.12), lymphovascular (p=0.019, HR:3.25 95%CI 1.21-8.74) and perineural invasion (p=0.027, HR:2.82 95%CI 1.13-7.06). Unlike familial FBC, the histological subtypes seen in familial MBC were more similar to those seen in sporadic MBC with 46 (76.7%) pure invasive ductal carcinoma of no special type (IDC-NST), 2 (3.3%) invasive lobular carcinomas and 4 (6.7%) invasive papillary carcinoma. A further 8 (13.3%) IDC-NST had foci of micropapillary differentiation, with a strong trend for co-occurrence in BRCA2 carriers (p=0.058). Most tumours were of the luminal phenotype (89.7%), with infrequent HER2 (8.6%) and basal (1.7%) phenotype tumours seen.
Conclusion
MBC in BRCA1/2 carriers and BRCAX families is different to females. Unlike FBC, a clear BRCA1 phenotype is not seen but a possible BRCA2 phenotype of micropapillary histological subtype is suggested. Comparison with sporadic MBCs shows this to be a high-risk population making further recruitment and investigation of this cohort of value in further understanding these uncommon tumours.
Male Breast Cancer
Sign Ribbon cells Horoscope Symbol Tattoos Research Zodiac Sign Ribbon Tattoos
Male Breast Cancer
Sign Ribbon cells Horoscope Symbol Tattoos Research Zodiac Sign Ribbon Tattoos
Male Breast Cancer
Sign Ribbon cells Horoscope Symbol Tattoos Research Zodiac Sign Ribbon Tattoos
Male Breast Cancer
Sign Ribbon cells Horoscope Symbol Tattoos Research Zodiac Sign Ribbon Tattoos
Male Breast Cancer
Sign Ribbon cells Horoscope Symbol Tattoos Research Zodiac Sign Ribbon Tattoos
Male Breast Cancer
Sign Ribbon cells Horoscope Symbol Tattoos Research Zodiac Sign Ribbon Tattoos
Male Breast Cancer
Sign Ribbon cells Horoscope Symbol Tattoos Research Zodiac Sign Ribbon Tattoos
Male Breast Cancer
Sign Ribbon cells Horoscope Symbol Tattoos Research Zodiac Sign Ribbon Tattoos
Male Breast Cancer
Sign Ribbon cells Horoscope Symbol Tattoos Research Zodiac Sign Ribbon Tattoos
Male Breast Cancer
Sign Ribbon cells Horoscope Symbol Tattoos Research Zodiac Sign Ribbon Tattoos
Male Breast Cancer
Sign Ribbon cells Horoscope Symbol Tattoos Research Zodiac Sign Ribbon Tattoos
Information On Cancer
Information On Cancer Biography
Source(google.com.pk)
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Guardian First Book award winner Siddhartha Mukherjee. Photograph: Deborah Feingold/AP
An oncologist has won the Guardian First Book award for his "biography" of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, which traces the disease from the first recorded mastectomy in 500BC to today's cutting edge research.
Siddhartha Mukherjee has called his book – a mix of history, memoir and biography, of science and the personal stories of cancer patients – "an attempt to enter the mind of this immortal illness, to understand its personality, to demystify its behaviour".
The only non-fiction title on the shortlist, it beat four novels to win the £10,000 award, narrowly seeing off Amy Waldman's The Submission, set in post-9/11 America. Stephen Kelman's Booker-shortlisted novel Pigeon English was also in the running.
The chair of judges, Lisa Allardice, editor of Guardian Review, said Mukherjee's "anthropomorphism of a disease" was a "remarkable and unusual achievement".
"In the end it came down to a very difficult decision between a first novel [The Submission] and a first book of tremendous research," she said. "They were so different – both incredibly impressive achievements in their own rights, but in the end the Mukherjee was felt to be the more original.
"He has managed to balance such a vast amount of information with lively narratives, combining complicated science with moving human stories. Far from being intimidating, it's a compelling, accessible book, packed full of facts and anecdotes that you know you will remember and which you immediately want to pass on to someone else."
Mukherjee, assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, embarked on the book in 2004, when a sarcoma patient asked him to explain what she was fighting.
"Patients would come up and ask: 'What is the story?' They were looking for a much deeper story, not their own particular medical history, but the larger context – what the origins of the disease were, and what would happen next. What the future was," he said. "It's a question I find particularly haunting. It seems to me as a scientist that we can only understand the future by understanding the past."
He began writing a journal in answer to his patients' questions, but by 2005 it had become obvious it could not be a small journal, that for the question of origin to be answered he "had to go back to the real origin rather than cutting it off at an arbitrary point. It became bigger and bigger until it reached its current form."
Sending it out to publishers, he received two types of response: either they said that no one would want to read about cancer or they got it immediately. "There was no grey area," he said.
Greeted with rave reviews when it was published, The Emperor of Maladies has already picked up a Pulitzer prize, with judges for the prestigious American award calling it "an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science".
Author and academic Sarah Churchwell – who joined Allardice on the judging panel for the Guardian award along with the authors David Nicholls and Antonia Fraser, Stuart Broom of Waterstone's and the Guardian's deputy editor Katharine Viner – said Mukherjee had "marshalled an immense amount of material into a readable and inspiring story" and that the result is "a gripping, enlightening read about the nature of illness and our battle against what begins to look like mortality itself".
Mukherjee, who is writing a second book, said it was "a great and distinct honour" to win the Guardian prize. "You never write books to win awards – they are immensely gratifying but unexpected," he said. "In recognising The Emperor of All Maladies, the judges have also recognised the extraordinary courage and resilience of the men and women who struggle with illness, and the men and women who struggle to treat illnesses.
"I am delighted and honoured to join a formidable list of writers and scholars – Zadie Smith, Alexandra Harris, Petina Gappah, and Alex Ross among them."
American Cancer Society
American Cancer Society Biography
Source(google.com.pk)
Gregory P. Bontrager, chief operating officer for the American Cancer Society, oversees the overall day-to-day operations of the world’s largest voluntary health organization. In this role, he provides leadership and direction to the Office of the Chief Mission Delivery Officer, Office of the Chief Financial Officer, Office of the Chief Counsel, the Office of Strategy, and to the field operations, Corporate IT, Corporate Communications, Talent Strategy, and Corporate Affairs and Strategic Governance functions. Additionally, he has a matrix supervisory relationship with the Society’s nonprofit, non-partisan 501(c)(4) advocacy affiliate, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN).
Prior to his current assignment, Mr. Bontrager served as deputy chief operating officer and chief mission officer at the NHO. Prior to these positions, he was chief executive of the Society’s Great Lakes Division, which encompasses the states of Michigan and Indiana. Under his leadership, the Division became one of the most successful of the Society’s 12 regional affiliates. This experience has provided his nationwide staff leadership with an innovative, community-based perspective.
Mr. Bontrager first joined the American Cancer Society in 1988 as director of development for the former Michigan Division. He later served as the Division’s vice president of development, senior vice president for operations, chief operating officer, and chief executive officer. He is a member of the Board of Directors for the National Human Services Assembly, an association of the nation’s leading national non-profits in the fields of health, human and community development, and human services. He is also a past member of the Board of Directors of the Karmanos Cancer Institute, the Spring Arbor University Board of Trustees, and the Plante & Moran, LLP/Michigan State University Broad Graduate School of Management Masters Forum.
Mr. Bontrager holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and business administration from Spring Arbor University, a master’s degree in administration from Western Michigan University, and is a graduate of the Emory University Business School Executive Development Institute. Mr. Bontrager is a nationally licensed New York Stock Exchange broker with special emphasis on investment counseling. He is a past recipient of the Spring Arbor University Young Leader Award, and was selected as a Rotary International Young Business Leaders Exchange team member to Japan.
Lymph Node Cancer
Lymph Node Cancer Biography
Source(google.com.pk)
Researchers from RIKEN Research Center for Allergy and Immunology in Japan research team, which earlier developed artificial lymph nodes, has recently shown that these artificial nodes can produce immune cells and strong immunological responses when transplanted into mice lacking a working immune system. Abstract.
This is an important step towards being able to strengthen or perhaps even replace human immune systems, particularly for fighting AIDS, cancer, and stubborn infectious diseases. According to project leader Takeshi Watanabe, the team wants to “make a prototype human model within two or three years."
By introducing artificial nodes bursting with robust T and B cells into AIDS patients, Watanabe believes he might be able to revitalize damaged immune systems. In terms of cancer, he envisions being able to adopt a similar approach, wherein the transplanted nodes will contain T cells targeted to track down the antigens produced by tumour cells and eliminate them.
How do They Do That?
Researchers first engineered mouse artificial Lymph Nodes (aLNs) by impregnating a two- to three-millimeter-diameter scaffold of fibrous structural protein collagen with connective tissue extracted from the thymus of newborn mice and dendritic cells. (Shown in photo above) Earlier studies suggested that it is the connective tissue stromal cells (connective tissue cells of an organ found in the loose connective tissue) which govern the structure of lymph nodes.
The aLNs were then initially implanted into mice with a normal, healthy immune system, which had previously been injected with a harmless antigen compound to trigger an immune response. So the aLNs became populated with immune system T-cells and B-cells which specifically recognize and counter germs or cancer cells expressing the injected antigen.
Four Weeks of Antigen Response
These primed aLNs were then transplanted into two sets of mice; a group with a normal immune system which had never been exposed to the antigen, and a group in which the immune system did not function. When the mice were then exposed to the antigen, both groups responded immediately by making appropriate protective antibodies, and the response to the antigen lasted for longer than four weeks, which means immune cells which retained memory of the antigen had been generated.
Further investigation of the immunodeficient mice showed that T- and B-cells from the aLNs migrated to their spleens and bone marrows and were there generating large numbers of antigen-specific antibody-forming cells. The results also revealed some of the compounds involved in directing this migration process.
The successful development of the aLNs in mice opens the way to producing customized lymph nodes impregnated with antibody-forming cells and other compounds specifically geared to treating certain conditions. “That is our purpose," says Watanabe, “not necessarily to make replacements for natural lymph nodes, but rather more functional organs applicable to particular diseases and allergies."
Astrology Cancer
Astrology Cancer Biography
Source(google.com.pk)
Cancer, the fourth sign of the zodiac, is all about home. Those born under this sign are 'roots' kinds of people, and take great pleasure in the comforts of home and family. Cancers are maternal, domestic and love to nurture others. More than likely, their family will be large, too -- the more, the merrier! Cancers will certainly be merry if their home life is serene and harmonious. Traditions are upheld with great zest in a Cancer's household, since these folks prize family history and love communal activities. They also tend to be patriotic, waving the flag whenever possible. A Cancer's good memory is the basis for stories told around the dinner table, and don't be surprised if these folks get emotional about things. Those born under this sign wear their heart on their sleeve, which is just fine by them.
The mascot of Cancer is the Crab, and much like this shelled little critter, Cancers are quick to retreat into their shells if it suits their mood. No wonder these folks are called crabby! For Cancer, it's not that big of a deal, though, since they consider this 'shell' a second home (and they do love home). The flip side of this hiding is that shell-bound Crabs are often quite moody. Further, in keeping with their difficulty in sharing their innermost feelings, it can become a Herculean task to pry a Crab out of its secret hiding place. What to do? Give the Crab time -- eventually these folks will come out to play again. When they do, they'll be the first to say so, in keeping with the Cardinal Quality attached to this sign. It's said that Crabs are first to laugh and first to cry, so you can bet they'll fill you in. That shell, by the way, isn't the only tough thing about Crabs. These folks are tenacious and strong-willed and like to get their way. If their well-documented kindness and gentleness doesn't do the trick, however, they're not above using emotional manipulation to make things happen. If that still doesn't work, they'll just go back to their shell and sulk, or find a way to get back at the source of their pain, since Crabs can be rather vindictive. That said, any self-respecting Crab would tell you that they are ultimately motivated by protecting their home and loved ones, a most noble goal.
Cancers are ruled by the Moon -- the Great Mother of the heavens in ancient times. Here on Earth, this is manifested in the Crab's maternal instincts and desire to protect home and hearth. This may appear smothering at times, but that's the Crab for you. The Moon is associated with fertility, too, a quality that is most pleasing to Cancers. The Moon is also the ruler of moods, and Cancers have plenty of those. These folks can cry you a river if they're so inclined, and they usually are. They can be overly sensitive, easily hurt and prone to brooding. Even so, Crabs find it easy to be sympathetic to others and are quick to show their affection. Their intuition is also a great help to them, especially in times of stress.
The element associated with Cancer is Water. Like the rolling waves of the sea, the Crab's emotions can make quite a splash. These folks tend to pick up on things and bring them in, with the outward result ranging from sentimentality to possessiveness. Crabs need to resist the temptation to become selfish or to feel sorry for themselves, since this behavior won't help. On the bright side, Cancers are good with money (although some consider them too thrifty), probably because they value a sense of security. Crabs are also quick to help others and tend to avoid confrontation. In keeping with their nurturing bent, those born under this sign are a whiz with food. A hearty picnic in the park is heaven-on-earth to most Crabs.
Cancers often find that a robust workout session is just the tonic for their touchy feelings. Team sports are always nice, since they offer a sense of community; water polo should be elemental to aquatic Crabs. What are their team colors? The Moon is silver and white. Since Cancers have a tendency to be lazy, however, they may need someone to push them out the door. When it comes to the game of love, eager Crabs are devoted, romantic and able to get things going on their own. Crabs are wise to listen to their gut, since this sign rules the stomach.
The great strength of the Cancer-born is the tenacity with which they protect their loved ones. These folks don't ask for much, either: a comfortable home and sense of peace about sums it up. It's that nurturing instinct which makes Cancers a pleasure to be with.
Causes Of Cancer
Causes Of Cancer Biography
source(google.com.pk)
All patients begin as storytellers, the oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee observes near the start of this powerful and ambitious first book. Long before they see a doctor, they become narrators of suffering, as Mukherjee puts it — travelers who have visited the “kingdom of the ill.”
Books of The Times: ‘The Emperor of All Maladies’ by Siddhartha Mukherjee (November 11, 2010)
Many doctors become storytellers too, and Mukherjee has undertaken one of the most extraordinary stories in medicine: a history of cancer, which will kill about 600,000 Americans by the end of this year, and more than seven million people around the planet. He frames it as a biography, “an attempt to enter the mind of this immortal illness, to understand its personality, to demystify its behavior.” It is an epic story that he seems compelled to tell, the way a passionate young priest might attempt a biography of Satan.
Mukherjee started on the road to this book when he began advanced training in cancer medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston in the summer of 2003. During his first week, a colleague who’d just completed the program took him aside. “It’s called an immersive training program. But by immersive, they really mean drowning,” he said, lowering his voice the way many of us do when we speak of cancer itself. “Have a life outside the hospital,” the doctor warned him. “You’ll need it, or you’ll get swallowed.”
“But it was impossible not to be swallowed,” Mukherjee writes. At the end of every evening he found himself stunned and speechless in the neon floodlights of the hospital parking lot, compulsively trying to reconstruct the day’s decisions and prescriptions, almost as consumed as his patients by the dreadful rounds of chemotherapy and the tongue-twisting names of the drugs, “Cyclophosphamide, cytarabine, prednisone, asparaginase. . . .”
Eventually he started this book so as not to drown.
The oldest surviving description of cancer is written on a papyrus from about 1600 B.C. The hieroglyphics record a probable case of breast cancer: “a bulging tumor . . . like touching a ball of wrappings.” Under “treatment,” the scribe concludes: “none.”
For more than 2,000 years afterward, there is virtually nothing about cancer in the medical literature (“or in any other literature,” Mukherjee adds.) The modern understanding of the disease originated with the recognition, in the first half of the 19th century, that all plants and animals are made of cells, and that all cells arise from other cells. The German researcher Rudolph Virchow put that in Latin: omnis cellula e cellula.
Cancer is a disease that begins when a single cell, among all the trillions in a human body, begins to grow out of control. Lymphomas, leukemias, malignant melanomas, sarcomas all begin with that microscopic accident, a mutation in one cell: omnis cellula e cellula e cellula. Cell growth is the secret of living, the source of our ability to build, adapt, repair ourselves; and cancer cells are rebels among our own cells that outrace the rest. “If we seek immortality,” Mukherjee writes, “then so, too, in a rather perverse sense, does the cancer cell.”
Mukherjee opens his book with the story of one of the founders of the hospital where he trained — Sidney Farber, a specialist in children’s diseases who began as a pathologist. In 1947, Farber worked in a tiny, dank laboratory in Boston, dissecting specimens and performing autopsies. He was fascinated by a sharklike species of cancer called acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which can move so fast that it kills an apparently healthy child within only a few days. A patient would be “brought to the hospital in a flurry of excitement, discussed on medical rounds with professorial grandiosity” and then sent home to die.
In the summer of 1947, a 2-year-old boy, the child of a Boston shipyard worker, fell sick. Examining a drop of the baby’s blood through the microscope, Farber saw the telltale signs of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, billions of malignant white cells “dividing in frenzy, their chromosomes condensing and uncondensing, like tiny clenched and unclenched fists.” By December, the boy was near death. In the last days of the year, Farber injected his patient with an experimental drug, aminopterin, and within two weeks he was walking, talking and eating again. It wasn’t a cure, only a remission; but for Farber it was the beginning of a dream of cures, of what one researcher called “a penicillin for cancer.”
The next year, Farber helped start a research fund drive around a boy who suffered from a lymphoma in his intestines, a disease that killed 90 percent of its victims. The boy was cherubic and blond, an enormous fan of the Boston Braves, and his name was Einar Gustafson. For the sake of publicity, Farber rechristened him Jimmy. That May, the host of the radio show “Truth or Consequences” interrupted his usual broadcast to bring his listeners into Jimmy’s hospital room to listen in as players on the Braves marched into Jimmy’s room and sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
By the summer of 1952, Farber had built an imposing new hospital, Jimmy’s Clinic. Soon, he was working on an even grander scale, with the help of an extraordinary socialite and medical philanthropist, Mary Lasker. (“I am opposed to heart attacks and cancer,” she once told a reporter, “the way one is opposed to sin.”) Mary and her husband, Albert, an advertising executive, joined forces with Farber. They wanted, as Mukherjee writes, “a Manhattan Project for cancer.” Together, through masterly advertising, fund-raising and passion for their common cause (“The iron is hot and this is the time to pound without cessation,” Farber wrote to Mary Lasker), they maneuvered the United States into what would become known as the war on cancer. Richard Nixon signed it into law with the National Cancer Act in 1971, authorizing the spending of $1.5 billion of research funds over the next three years.
In political terms, the war was well timed, coming at a time when America’s collective nightmares were no longer “It Came From Outer Space” or “The Man From Planet X,” but “The Exorcist” and “They Came from Within.” Mary Lasker called the war on cancer the country’s next moon shot, the conquest of inner space.
In scientific terms, however, the war was disastrously premature. The moon race had been based on rocket science. But in the early 1970s, there really wasn’t a science of cancer. Researchers still did not understand what makes cells turn malignant. Now that they were so much in the spotlight, and in the money, they fell into bickering, demoralized, warring factions. The “iconic battleground” of the time was the chemotherapy ward, Mukherjee writes, “a sanitized vision of hell.” Typically it was a kind of limbo, almost a jail, in which absolutely no one spoke the word “cancer,” the inmates’ faces had an orange tinge from the drugs they were given, and windows were covered with heavy wire mesh to keep them from committing suicide. “The artifice of manufactured cheer (a requirement for soldiers in battle) made the wards even more poignantly desolate,” Mukherjee writes.
“The Emperor of All Maladies” is a history of eureka moments and decades of despair. Mukherjee describes vividly the horrors of the radical mastectomy, which got more and more radical, until it arrived at “an extraordinarily morbid, disfiguring procedure in which surgeons removed the breast, the pectoral muscles, the axillary nodes, the chest wall and occasionally the ribs, parts of the sternum, the clavicle and the lymph nodes inside the chest.” Cancer surgeons thought, mistakenly, that each radicalization of the procedure was progress. “Pumped up with self-confidence, bristling with conceit and hypnotized by the potency of medicine, oncologists pushed their patients — and their discipline — to the brink of disaster,” Mukherjee writes. In this army, “lumpectomy” was originally a term of abuse.
Meanwhile, more Americans were dying of cancer than ever, mainly because of smoking. Back in 1953, the average adult American smoked 3,500 cigarettes a year, or about 10 a day. Almost half of all Americans smoked. By the early 1940s, as one epidemiologist wrote, “asking about a connection between tobacco and cancer was like asking about an association between sitting and cancer.” In the decade and a half after Nixon declared his war on cancer, lung cancer deaths among older women increased by 400 percent. That epidemic is still playing itself out.
Mukherjee is good on the propaganda campaign waged by the tobacco companies, “the proverbial combination of smoke and mirrors.” As one internal industry report noted in 1969, “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact.’ ” This episode makes particularly interesting reading to anyone following the current propaganda campaigns against the science of climate change.
Meanwhile, those who studied the causes of cancer in the laboratories and those who treated it in the clinics were not always talking to each other. As Mukherjee puts it, “The two conversations seemed to be occurring in sealed and separate universes.” The disease was hard to understand either intellectually, in the lab, or emotionally, in the clinic. In the lab, because it is so heterogeneous in its genetics and its migrations in the body. In the hospital, because its course is horrible and so often slow, drawn out. When it comes to cancer, Mukherjee writes, “dying, even more than death, defines the illness.”
Mukherjee stitches stories of his own patients into this history, not always smoothly. But they are very strong, well-written and unsparing of himself: “Walking across the hospital in the morning to draw yet another bone-marrow biopsy, with the wintry light crosshatching the rooms, I felt a certain dread descend on me, a heaviness that bordered on sympathy but never quite achieved it.”
The heroes of the last few decades of this epic history are Robert Weinberg, Harold Varmus, Bert Vogelstein and the other extraordinary laboratory scientists who have finally worked out the genetics of cancer, and traced the molecular sequence of jammed accelerators and missing brakes that release those first rebel cells. As James Watson wrote not long ago, “Beating cancer now is a realistic ambition because, at long last, we largely know its true genetic and chemical characteristics.” We may finally be ready for war.
As a clinician, Mukherjee is only guardedly optimistic. One of the constants in oncology, as he says, is “the queasy pivoting between defeatism and hope.” Cancer is and may always be part of the burden we carry with us — the Greek word onkos means “mass” or “burden.” As Mukherjee writes, “Cancer is indeed the load built into our genome, the leaden counterweight to our aspirations for immortality.” But onkos comes from the ancient Indo-European nek, meaning to carry the burden: the spirit “so inextricably human, to outwit, to outlive and survive.” Mukherjee has now seen many patients voyage into the night. “But surely,” he writes, “it was the most sublime moment of my clinical life to have watched that voyage in reverse, to encounter men and women returning from that strange country— to see them so very close, clambering back.”
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