Radical Change for Routine Prostate Cancer Treatment

(American Health Newswire) - It has been said that 1 in every 6 men will develop prostate cancer during their lifetime. Second to skin cancer, prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers found in men today. Researchers have been constantly developing better therapies to treat the life threatening disease.

New study results have just upended a decades-old prostate cancer therapy approach. Senior author of the long-term study Ian M. Thompson Jr., M.D., director of the Cancer Therapy & Research Center at the UT Health Science Center was quoted as saying, "I now treat patients very differently, and that will change clinical care forever."

Hormone treatments fight prostate cancer by turning off testosterone production in men's bodies. But the side effects of those treatments include mood changes, bone loss, sexual dysfunction, hot flashes and weight gain. Due to his, many patients choose to "pulse" their treatment, which is when they take the hormones until the cancer stops growing, stop the treatment for a while, and then restart it when the cancer begins to grow again.

In the end, these men grew worse instead of better. "The very patients you'd logically offer intermittent therapy did not do as well," Dr. Ian Thompson was quoted as saying.  "What I and so many of us who specialize in prostate cancer thought we knew, based on our experience, was simply wrong."

The study included more than 1,500 men with hormone-sensitive metastatic prostate cancer who were randomly assigned to receive intermittent hormonal therapy or continuous hormonal therapy. Patients in the intermittent therapy group received about half as much hormonal therapy as those in the continuous therapy group.

The survival rates of the men with continues therapy were significantly higher than those who received intermittent hormonal therapy. In men with minimal disease spread (meaning it did not spread beyond the spine, pelvis, and lymph nodes) was 7.1 years for those who received continuous therapy compared to 5.2 years for the intermittent therapy group.

"In comparison to many current 'breakthrough' treatments for prostate cancer that improve survival by two to three months, this is an incredible discovery," Dr. Thompson concluded.

SOURCE: American Society of Clinical Oncology

New Sleep Apnea Treatment Improves Depression?

(American Health Newswire) -- Do you have depressive symptoms as a result of obstructive sleep apnea? If so, there's something new in the works that could help!

A new study of 779 patients was recently done at The Cleveland Clinic to assess the depressive symptoms related to obstructive sleep disorder (OSA). OSA is a sleep-related breathing disorder that occurs when the tissue in the back of the throat collapses and blocks the airway, causing the body to stop breathing during sleep.

The new treatment is called positive airway pressure (PAP). PAP therapy keeps the airway open with a stream of air whilst sleeping.

Before the patients began participation in the study, they were asked to fill out a standardized PHQ-9 form, a tool used for assisting primary care clinician in diagnosing depression. The patients were assessed again with the same form following the PAP treatment, and all showed improvement in their scores; however patients using their PAP devices for more than four hours per night had greater score improvements than those failing to use PAP as prescribed. Other factors that affected the improvements in the scores were whether the patient was sleepy and marital status.

"The score improvements remained significant even after taking into account whether a patient had a prior diagnosis of depression or was taking an anti-depressant," Charles Bae, MD, principal investigator in the study was quoted saying.

Source: SLEEP 2012, the 26th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS)

Cell Surprise: Mutation In Cancer Cells

(American Health Newswire) --A game-changing find challenges previously held beliefs about the role of mutations in cancer development. Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle say their findings show that the number of new mutations is significantly lower in cancers than in normal cells.

"This is completely opposite of what we see in nuclear DNA, which has an increased overall mutation burden in cancer," cancer geneticist Jason Bielas, Ph.D., an assistant member of the Public Health Sciences and Human Biology divisions at the Hutchinson Center was quoted as saying.

Mitochondria, which are primarily responsible for the cell's energy production, have their own set of DNA, which encodes genes critical for the functioning of the cell. While the role of genomic instability has been well characterized in nuclear DNA, this is the first attempt to determine whether instability in mitochondrial DNA may play a similar role in cancer growth and metastasis.

"We were surprised to find that the frequency of new mutations in mitochondrial DNA from tumor cells is decreased compared to that of normal cells," Dr. Bielas was quoted as saying. "By extension, this suggests, somewhat counter intuitively, that higher mitochondrial mutation rates may actually serve as a barrier to cancer development, and drugs that focus directly on increasing mitochondrial DNA damage and mutation might swap cancer's immortality for accelerated aging and tumor-cell death."

Dr. Bielas suggests that the mitochondria are able to maintain genetic stability in the face of cancer because unlike normal cells, cancer cells do not need oxygen to survive. In fact, cancer cells decrease the process by which they get energy from the mitochondria and rely instead on glycolysis, a form of energy production in the absence of oxygen.

"We believe less damage occurs to mitochondrial DNA of cancer cells because they no longer need oxygen," Dr. Belias added. "If we could program a cancer cell to once again need oxygen, we expect it would die - with minimal side effects."

Bielas and colleagues are currently testing this theory in the lab, seeing whether cancer cells that are reprogrammed to utilize oxygen and/or are targeted for mitochondrial DNA damage respond better to certain therapeutic agents.

"This work started with the idea that there would be a huge mutation burden in the mitochondrial DNA, but our findings were completely opposite of what we had expected. Hopefully our discovery will open up new avenues for treatment, early detection and monitoring treatment response of colon cancer and other malignancies," Dr. Bielas concluded

SOURCE: PLoS Genetics, June 7