By Sarah A
LoBisco, ND
This week I
posted my September 2013 Top Holistic Health Reads on my redesigned BreakFree Medicine website. The topics
includethe top stories in the
following areas:
HEALTH
NEWS: Naturopathic Medicine Week for the first week in October, Online
Supplement Risks, The Use of Peppermint Oil for Exercise and Lung Health, and
Brain Health Headlines
NUTRIGENOMICS: Curcumin to Boost Women’s Exercise
Performance, Heart Health Nutrients, Nutrients for Gut Health, Brain Health,
and Joint Health
DRUG UPDATES: A Link Between this Medication
Class and Breast Cancer, Stimulant Use Risks, New Warnings on Drug Classes,
Nutrients vs. Drugs in Trials, and Highlights on ADHD and Autism
Be sure you
visit my site at dr-lobisco.com to
take a skim through. 🙂
The focus for
this blog continues with the theme of top health updates, but with a specific focus on cancer (emphasis
mine):
1. HPV Vaccine Controversy -Dr.
Mercola’s View
- With human papillomavirus (HPV)
vaccination rates far below targets, the US Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) is redoubling efforts to promote HPV vaccine as an
‘anti-cancer’ vaccine- Describing Gardasil or Cervarix,
the two HPV vaccines, as ‘anti-cancer vaccines’ could be described as
borderline fraudulent as they’ve never been proven to prevent cancer- The HPV vaccine only contains two strains of HPV
associated with cancer, but there are about 15 of them known to
potentially cause cancer; in most cases HPV infection does not become chronic or
lead to cancer but rather naturally resolves on its own within two years- Deadly blood clots, acute
respiratory failure, cardiac arrest and “sudden death due to unknown
causes” have all occurred in girls after they’ve received the
Gardasil vaccine- Routine pap smear testing is a
far more rational and less dangerous strategy for cervical cancer
prevention, as it can identify chronic HPV infection and may provide
greater protection against development of cervical cancer than reliance on
HPV vaccinations
Mercola, J.
CDC: HPV, the ‘Anti-Cancer’ Vaccine? Mercola.com. September 3, 2013.
2. New Breast Cancer- HRT Risk Factors
Studied
A greater than 20% increased risk in breast cancer was
associated with HRT use among white
women and Hispanic women, but not black women. HRT use was more strongly
associated with breast cancer risk in women with low or normal BMI but no association was observed among
women with a high BMI. In addition, women with denser breasts had an increased likelihood of
breast cancer among those who reported HRT use as well. The authors went on to
investigate the combined effect of BMI and breast density because the two are
correlated. They found a statistically significant interaction between breast
density and HRT independent of BMI and identified high and low risk subgroups:
HRT use was not associated with breast cancer for women with high BMI with low
breast density whereas HRT use was associated with a statistically significant
higher risk of breast cancer for women with low or normal BMI and high breast
density.
Science
Daily. Association Between Hormone Replacement Therapy Use and Breast Cancer
Risk Varies. September 3, 2013.
3. Call
Them ‘Indolentomas,’ Not Cancer?
There’s been abuzz in the medical community on the risks and benefits of
treating and screening for pre-cancerous tumors:
Data show that unindicated mass screening and early therapy
can work well with cancer of the uterine cervix and
probably of the colon.Lung cancer screening in selected
patients is too early to tell. Such approaches fail with ovary,
melanoma, breast, and prostate. Pathologists never can really predict how any
one cancer will behave. But after many decades of matching histologic patterns
with the natural history of diseases, we are actually pretty good at predicting
which lesions will be really bad actors and which seem likely to lie around
indolently.
Cure rates from
aggressive therapy on those “indolentomas” are 100%. But, so would
the outcomes have been of nondiscovery—100% cure of nondisease.
Lundberg, G.
Cancer? Not! Medscape
Internal Medicine. Medscape.com. August 29, 2013.
4. Individualized Cancer Treatment
& Issues for the Aging Population
The risk of cancer increases with age, and older adults
account for just over half of the 1.6 million new cases diagnosed each year. By
2030, new diagnoses are expected to reach 2.3 million a year as the population
ages. The report warns there may not be enough oncology specialists to care for
them.
Perhaps a bigger concern is the growing complexity of care. Increasingly, scientists are finding
genetic differences inside tumors that help explain why one person’s cancer is
more aggressive than another’s. More importantly, that also means certain
cancer drugs will work for, say, lung cancer in one person but not the next.
“If your doctor doesn’t know that, or your hospital
doesn’t do the test, you don’t have that opportunity” for newer, targeted therapies,
Ganz said. But, “we are living in an information age where it’s impossible
to keep up.”
Neergaard,
L. Report finds aging US faces crisis in cancer care. Associated Press.com.
September 10, 2013.
NUTRIGENOMIC
SOLUTIONS
5. Antioxidants and Cancer Risk
(1) The Use of Antioxidants for Heart
and Cancer Based on the Individual
Methods: We evaluated all-cause, cancer and cardiovascular
mortality risks associated with quintiles (Q1-Q5) of serum antioxidant
(vitamins C and E, beta-carotene, and selenium) and vitamin A levels, in 16,008
adult NHANES III (The Third National Health and Nutrition Examination survey,
1988-1994) participants.
Conclusions:
Antioxidant supplement use should be studied in the context of overall
mortality and other competing mortality risks. Impact: These data suggest the
possible use of novel intervention studies where doses of these agents are
individualized based on serum levels, and possibly, markers of oxidative stress
and systemic inflammatory response.
Goyal A,
Terry MB, Siegel AB. Serum Antioxidant Nutrients, Vitamin A, and Mortality in
US Adults. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2013 Aug 8. [Epub ahead of print]
(2) Beta-Carotene Levels Lower Bladder
Cancer Risk for Women in One Study
The study included data from 185,885 older adults who were
part of the Multiethnic Cohort Study, which started in 1993. Over a 12.5-year
period, 581 people developed invasive bladder cancer (of which 429 were men and
152 were women).
Researchers took into account known bladder cancer risk
factors, such as age, and still found an association between produce
consumption and bladder cancer risk. Specifically, the women in the study who
consumed the most yellow-orange vegetables in the study had at 52 percent lower
risk of developing bladder cancer over the study period, compared with people
who consumed the fewest yellow-orange vegetables.
Huffington
Post.Colorful Vegetables Could Lower Women’s Bladder Cancer Risk
.HuffingtonPost.com. 8/27/13.
6. The Power of Flaxseed in Women’s
Health for Cancer Prevention
All the more reason why a new meta-analysis on flaxseed and breast cancer published
in the journal Integrative Cancer Therapy this month is so timely. The review was
no small undertaking, as it obtained its findings by sorting through 1,892
records from a variety of biomedical databases, including MEDLINE, Embase, the
Cochrane Library, and AMED from inception to January 2013, concerning any
available human interventional or observational data pertaining to flax and
breast cancer.
They discovered the following benefits of flaxseed among
newly diagnosed breast cancer patients:
- Decreases
in hot flash symptomatology- Increased
cell death (apoptosis) within their tumors- Decreased
HER2 expression (a protein associated with breast cancer malignancy)- Decreased
breast cancer proliferation
Ji, S.
Flaxseed Can Prevent And Kill Breast Cancer, Meta-Analysis Reveals.
GreenMedInfo. September 11, 2013.
Please, don’t let this information scare you.
Use these updates to empower yourself with more information for wellness and for tools to modulate your risk for cancer with lifestyle interventions. Learn more
resources and tools to use on my currently being-redesigned BreakFree Medicine Site.
