Centers for Disease Control & Prevention

The flu season has arrived early in the U.S., and includes the H3N2 influenza strains which previously have been associated with more serious flu seasons. Especially during the holidays when people gather and travel, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) wants you to know some important facts, if you have cancer now or if you have had cancer in the past:

• Every person aged 6 months or older should get a flu shot;
• Only 37% of age-eligible Americans had gotten their flu shots as of the latest survey in mid-November;
• Although we don’t know if people with or having survived cancer get infected with influenza viruses more often, people who have cancer now or who are disease-free but have had cancer previously are at higher risk for complications if they get the flu;
• The CDC revised its pneumonia vaccine recommendations in Oct. 2012: Now, adults with specific immunocompromising conditions (included generalized malignancy) should get two different pneumonia vaccinations. Read the rest of this entry »

by Mary Miller

Fight Colorectal Cancer is thrilled to announce during this holiday season that thanks to the generous donations made to the Lisa Fund, it will be awarding its first-ever two-year $100,000 grant to a scientist whose work fights advanced stage colorectal cancer.

Andrea Bertotti, MD, PhD, of the Institute for Cancer Research and Treatment (IRCC) in Candiolo, Italy, has learned that his lab will receive this major grant. “His work will be ground-breaking and exactly in line with the reason Lisa Dubow created this fund—to support a promising researcher working to advance the treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer,” said Carlea Bauman, president of Fight Colorectal Cancer. Fully 100 percent of donations go directly to support young scientists. Each year’s winner is selected by an expert panel of researchers, through a review process administered by the American Association for Cancer Research. Read the rest of this entry »

By Curt Pesman

Low-carb (and lower sugar) diets may soon look a lot better to colorectal cancer survivors. In a recent data-rich study of more than 1000 stage III colon cancer survivors, researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute found that those who consistently ate a high-carbohydrate, sugar-laden diet appeared to have markedly higher recurrence rates of their disease than patients whose diets were more varied and contained less-sugar. The results were published in the Nov. 7 Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The main finding after surveying and following 1,011 patients during and 6 months after chemotherapy? That those who reported having the highest dietary levels of carbohydrate intake (and related glycemic load) also had an 80 percent increased risk of colon cancer recurrence or death compared with those who had the lowest carb diets.

 But because cancer patients (and health-minded others) are advised not to make a nutritional or lifestyle change based on just one research study or peer-reviewed journal article, it’s worth noting that in the Feb. 7^th issue of Nature, doctors from the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF) argued that sugar effects are so detrimental that the substance should be regulated like alcohol and tobacco to protect consumers’ health.  Read the rest of this entry »

Pausing today to give thanks for this amazing Fight Colorectal Cancer community, we’d like to especially salute the doctors, nurses, family and friends who work every single day to support people living with colorectal cancer, and to the researchers who devote endless days and nights fighting this disease.

Just before the holiday, we got a final progress report from Dr. Jon Chung, who received the 2011 Lisa Fund grant.  Every single dollar that supported his work came from this community of people who donated to the Lisa Fund, so you should know what your generous donations brought:

“I am extremely grateful for the award of this grant. It has been hugely beneficial in my career. Since the end of the grant funding period, I have been promoted to faculty at Johns Hopkins…As a result of this grant, the laboratory has developed a firm interest in developing [new] inhibitors for Hedgehog signaling…in colorectal cancer—an area of research that had not been previously a focus of the laboratory. I believe that the focus cancer signaling pathways will be a feature of my current and future career as a cancer researcher.”    

Dr. Chung is researching one of the signaling ‘pathways’ that cause colorectal cancer to change from localized to metastatic disease. During his Lisa-funded year, he and his coworkers identified a new gene involved with activating Hedgehog, which eventually could lead to a new biomarker test.

So thank you: Not only did your contributions build a concrete step forward in the fight against metastatic cancer, but you made a life-changing impact on a promising young scientist—and a whole laboratory.

At our Thanksgiving tables today, there are a few beloved faces missing—I think of Lisa Dubow, who started the Lisa Fund as thanks for researchers who gave her an extra 9 years of life. And I think of Kate Murphy, who started this blog to bring Research news to you, and who also used her years living with cancer to make a huge impact on countless lives.

In the great circle of life, their legacy lives into the future, thanks to people like Dr. Chung and you in this community.

 Read more: about Dr. Chung’s work,  and Lisa Dubow.

Early discussions about desired end-of-life care, among patients with incurable cancer, were associated with less aggressive treatment in the last month of life, according to a study published this week in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (Nov. 13 online ahead of print).

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) highlighted this study for providing “the first-of-its-kind scientific evidence that timing of end-of-life discussions affects decisions” and actual treatment given at the end of a patient’s life.

The study found that nearly 40% of end-of-life discussions with cancer patients happened in the last 30 days of life. Among patients who had such discussions earlier, they were much more likely to receive hospice care and less likely to be treated aggressively at the end of life. Read the rest of this entry »