"Advances Elusive in the Long Drive to Cure Cancer" by Gina Kolata's on the front page of the New York Times seemed to cast a depressing shadow across the busy landscape of dedicated researchers, clinicians and patients who are fighting the war on cancer all across the country.

She remarked, "only a very few things make a difference" - to which I would reply, NOT SO! Kolata pointed out that deaths from cardiac disease have fallen 64% in the past 55 years (primarily because many Americans have stopped smoking, altered their diets, increased their physical activity and taken medications that are known to decrease their risk of heart attacks and stroke) but, by comparison, cancer deaths have dropped by only 5%. But what have Americans done to understand more fully the causes cancer and what have we done to aggressively prevent the disease? Not much, I'd say.

Let me speak from my own professional perspective about breast cancer.

In 2005, the World Health Organization declared birth control pills to be Group I carcinogens, known to cause cancer in humans. Yet every day around the world 100 million women take the pill, and everyday they excrete the hormone metabolites of these pills into our shared environment. The package inserts that the FDA requires in every pack of oral contraceptives fails to mention the WHO warning; instead the insert equivocates about the risk of breast cancer, crafting a message that seemingly minimizes the danger. What could be done to better educate women about this risk and thus prevent new cases of breast cancer? Better education about the increased risk of breast cancer associated with the use of oral contraceptives would obviously be a cost-effective way to prevent it, saving money, lives, and breasts in the process.

In 2003 when medical researchers concluded that hormone replacement therapy directly causes breast cancer millions of women (themselves) promptly stopped taking these pills. Within just a few years the number of new cases of breast cancer began to fall. Where is the public policy that supports this wise, spontaneous grass-roots movement away from HRT? Are we waiting for stone tablets to appear from behind a burning bush with a new commandment, "Don't use exogenous hormones"?

Cigarette smoking has long been known to cause breast cancer. Why are there no aggressive anti-smoking policies and initiatives in place, either by our public health officials or by the large and impressively organized breast cancer foundations, to combat this known breast cancer carcinogen?

The "fads" that Kolata suggested including the belief that viruses are possible causes of cancer, ARE NOT FADs. At least six viruses have been proven to cause cancer - one of them, the human papilloma virus, now has a vaccine that prevents the cervical cancer it causes, and its discoverers have Nobel Prizes for their work. Furthermore, there is convincing evidence that as much as 40% of all breast cancer is caused by a virus. Kolata is right, "just eating right and exercising" won't help you much if you have a virus that causes breast cancer, so we need to do more to investigate this possibility, and we shouldn't have to wait several more decades before we answer the question, "Does a virus cause breast cancer in women?"

Did Phyllis Kutt, the woman with end-stage breast cancer who was featured in Kolata's article, ever use oral contraceptives? Did she bump into the mountain of hormonal metabolites circulating in our environment? Did a virus cause her breast cancer? If we can answer these questions, and others, we can move out of the shadow cast by Kolata's article and into the sunshine where we prevent cancer. We need to more than walk, run, dance and hope for a cure - we need to understand its causes and prevent it.

President Obama has decided that he wants to increase funding for cancer research by 30% over the next two years. Good. Excellent idea. My suggestion is that the money be spent researching ways to get the information we presently have about how to prevent cancer circulating more effectively, rather than to spend it trying to find clever (and always expensive) interventions that may only postpone cancer death by just a few weeks.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dr._Kathleen_T._Ruddy

A study published in the American National Cancer Institute's journal showed that women should avoid taking antioxidant supplements during radiotherapy or chemotherapy.

Antioxidant molecules represent in several vegetable foods function as prevention of many chronic diseases, such as Alzheimer or cardiovascular diseases, as well as several type of cancers. This protection neutralizes the adverse effects associated with free radicals, which create extremely reactive molecules from the oxygen. Free radicals attack many components of the cell, especially DNA. Antioxidants associated with the diet modify these free radicals into inoffensive products and reduce their adverse effects.

Vegetable antioxidants have beneficial effects. A blooming market was introduced by many supplement containing these molecules in high concentration. However, unlike the multitude of study on vegetables as functional foods, numerous documented over the last 20 years, do not show evidence that supplements have benefits on breast cancer except for vitamin D in winter. Furthermore, the inverse was observed with vitamin A and E.

Supplements are particular popular among cancer patients since they are more inclined to try multiple combination of remedies to fight their disease and reduce the effectiveness of the cancer treatment. While the neutralization of free radical prevent cancer, many treatments like radiotherapy and several chemotherapy drugs depends on generating free radicals.

For example, among breast cancer patients receiving radiotherapy, the intake of a vitamin E supplement during radiotherapy, and during the next 3 years, increase the risk of a cancer relapse by almost 40%. The supplement in large doses negate the radiotherapy or chemotherapy and help protect the cancer cells which then increases a resistance to treatments.

The Worlds Cancer Research Fund strongly discourages diet supplements during and after treatments. The priority is to carry their oncologist's recommendation on the best treatments to fight breast cancer. In order to maximize the positive impact of the treatment the following principle was issued by the Worlds Cancer Research Fund.

1. Maintain a healthy weight
2. Exercise 30 minutes per day
3. Don't smoke
4. Avoid manufactured foods rich in saturated fats, trans fats and lot of sugar
5. Eat 5 to 10 part of fruits and vegetables



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Teenager girls fear breast cancer although they in general understand the disease is unusual in their age group.

The number of women detected with the disease rose radically in the 20th century, rising fear of it and leading more and more women to select prophylactic mastectomies. But much of this growth stands for overdiagnosis. Americans have to know the overselling of cancer fear, and have to query present practices that are based on the often-illusory objective of reasserting a number of control over fear.

Fear of dying from breast cancer is spurring increasingly women to undertake the most fundamental of surgical alternatives: bilateral mastectomy. Latest research discovers that the number of women diagnosed with cancer in one breast who had bilateral mastectomies soared from 1.8 percent in 1998 to 4.5 percent in 2003. That's a growth of 150 percent in only five years. At this rate, bilateral mastectomy may one day turn out to be the norm for women detected with the disease.

But women have other reasons to fear breast cancer. The 1:8 lifetime odds of growing breast cancer are extensively touted and frightening, and corroborate lots of women's sense that it is everywhere.

If you're frightened that you will someday hear the words, "You have breast cancer," you've got plenty of company. It is the most feared cancer amongst women. At times, it's not simply the word "cancer" that's at the origin of the fear, but fear of issues connected with treating cancer, like surgical problems and medication side effects. Possibly you've been through its diagnosis with somebody near to you and understand how complicated it could be.

Though these are understandable fears, the danger is that some women are much besieged with nervousness that they delay screenings, like breast exams and mammograms, or even skip them in total for fear of bad news. However these are the very examinations that could assist save lives by discovering cancer early on, when it's most treatable.

Women who are recently detected with breast cancer confront an unusual set of fears as they go through a variety of stages of nervousness and recognition. Lots of are in a state of denial in the beginning. This could rapidly turn to annoyance and a reaction that their world has been turned upturned. A number of women speculate what they have completed to be worthy of this and are hesitant concerning the best road to improvement. Ultimately, reality sets in and treatment starts, which is when lots of women experience better and more in control of their disease since they are enthusiastically combating it.



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