Unraveling breast cancer risk

Only about 10 percent of people with breast cancer have links to known gene variants, but another 20 percent have significant family history. Scientists are delving deeper into the genome to find what remains unexplained.

https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/heal...veling-breast-cancer-risk

Promising new insight into how coffee compounds can inhibit prostate cancer

"We found that kahweol acetate and cafestol inhibited the growth of the cancer cells in mice, but the combination seemed to work synergistically, leading to a significantly slower tumor growth than in untreated mice," explains Hiroaki Iwamoto, first author on the new research. "After 11 days, the untreated tumors had grown by around 3 and a half times the original volume (342%), whereas the tumors in the mice treated with both compounds had grown by around just over one and a half (167%) times the original size."

The compounds aren't found in filter coffee.

More at: https://newatlas.com/prostate-cancer-coffee-compounds/58896/

I remember a study long ago (decades ago now) where they wanted to study the effect of chicken soup in curing some disease (I believe the common cold). Fortunately, the study was well done. They randomized the cold sufferers as to who got what. Some got chicken soup, some got hot water, and some got something else (I forgot what; perhaps plain water). Chicken soup came out best, but hot water was almost as good, and the something else was nearly ineffective. The doctors did not know who got what, though the patients could easily guess what they got. So the placebo effect (not appreciated as a problem in those days) may have influenced the results a little.

A new wearable device, tested on animals, can capture and remove tumor cells circulating in the bloodstream.

Catching cancerous cells circulating in the bloodstream could save lives. Cancer spreads when cells from primary tumors break off and travel through the bloodstream and the lymph system. Most circulating tumor cells, or CTCs, that enter the bloodstream die, but some can travel to new areas of the body to settle and form tumors. It is this spreading of cancer, or metastasis, that primarily causes cancer-related deaths. “These circulating tumor cells are the seeds of metastasis,” says Sunitha Nagrath, an associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan who co-authored the paper.

So Nagrath and her team have built a wearable microfluidic machine capable of identifying cancer cells and nabbing them. When blood drawn from a vein is pumped through the device, it captures tumor cells and then pumps the blood back into the body.

In addition to its envisioned purpose as a cancer treatment that filters out tumor cells, the microfluidic machine could be used in a diagnostic role. The researchers say it could estimate the number of circulating tumor cells in the bloodstream, or help characterize the tumor from which they came.

More at: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomed...EEE+Spectrum+Full+Text%29

The cause of cancer is written into the DNA of tumours, scientists have discovered, in a breakthrough which could finally show how much disease is attributable to factors like air pollution or pesticides. Until now the roots of many cancers have proved elusive, with doctors unable to tease out the impact of a myriad of carcinogenic causes which people encounter everyday. Even with lung cancer, it is not known just how much can be attributed to smoking and how much could be linked to other factors, such as living by a busy road, or inhaling pollutants at work.

But now scientists at Cambridge University and King’s College London have shown that tumours hold information like a 'black box' pointing to the cause of disease. They exposed stem cells to dozens of known carcinogens and recorded how each alters its DNA code as cancer forms. It provides a ‘fingerprint’ or ‘mutational signature’ of the underlying cause and could even show which was the biggest culprit.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2019/04/1...ists-find-creating-black/