Cancer and Your Genes

Christina Applegate Talks About Her Breast Cancer Surgery on Oprah Today

According to the show's website, Christina Applegate will be appearing on Oprah today:

"Christina Applegate opens up about her battle with cancer and her radical decision to remove both breasts.  Then, we all have so many questions.  What should we be doing?"

Apparently, Ms. Applegate will be discussing her breast cancer diagnosis and the genetic testing that apparently led to her decision to pursue bilateral mastectomy recently.

A YouTube preview of the show is located here.

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Know someone with Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer risk due to a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation?  Encourage them to check out BRCAscoop.com - a new high quality health information resource focused on newly published evidence related to cancer prevention, screening and treatment for people with BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations

Poetry and Art as Outlets for Cancer Patients

Tara Parker-Pope at the Well blog (NY Times) has an interesting post on poetry as an expressive outlet for cancer patients. 

Other forms of art can also be helpful (see here):

• Confronting Cancer Through Art
• Art for Recovery
• Joan Bowman
• The Art Therapy Blog
• Strength from Unity
• Arts in Medicine Program

Survival in Prostate Cancer: It May Be Affected By Your Genes

We frequently hear about connections between our genes and the risk of developing prostate and other cancers.  However, a new study provides further evidence in support of an old idea that our genes may affect something much more important than the development of cancer; indeed, this new research supports the concept that our genes affect survival from prostate cancer. 

Dr. Kari Hemminki and colleagues, in a fascinating piece of epidemiologic sleuthing published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, utilized the Swedish Family-Cancer Database to determine whether survival patterns from prostate cancer clustered within families.  By assessing survival data for more than 600 prostate cancer-affected sons and their fathers (who also had prostate cancer), they were able to show that sons of fathers with shorter survival from prostate cancer tended to survive for a shorter period as well.  Likewise, sons of fathers who survived for a longer period of time after the diagnosis tended to survive for a longer period of time as well. 

Although these results shouldn't be utilized at this point to guide treatment decisions, as they may be subject to some biases and need further confirmation, they should pave the way for future studies aimed at identification of genes underlying this familial risk.  This would be a refreshing approach in an area of medicine beset with substantial uncertainty surrounding best treatments - particularly with respect to decisions regarding prostatectomy versus "watchful waiting."  It will be very interesting to see how this turns out, and it is important to remember that genes that may confer risk of metastatic disease and/or poor survival may not be genes that are involved in risk of developing prostate cancer (i.e., they only affect the rate of progression or metastasis of the disease once it is already established). 

Selected References

K Hemminki et al.  Concordance of survival in family members with prostate cancer.  Journal of Clinical Oncology 26: 1705-9, 2008.

Resources

Prostate Cancer Foundation

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