Cancer News

A University of Liverpool team found a family of proteins involved in controlling cell movement could be key.

The study, which appears in the journal Gut, could offer a new lead on a disease which is hard to treat.

There are around 7,000 cases of pancreatic cancer in the UK each year. It can be hard to spot as the pancreas is located deep inside the body.

ISLAMABAD - People with a family history of pancreatic cancer should make an extra effort to stay off tobacco.

A new study suggests smoking could trigger this deadly form of cancer in people who are at high risk of developing the disease. Researchers from the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, studied 826 people with pancreatic cancer, of whom 30 had at least one close relative who had also had the disease.

They found that people with a family history were more likely to develop the disease at a younger age -- below 50 -- and also more likely to be smokers. Smoking is known to raise the risk of pancreatic cancer, said study co-author John Gibbs, MD, FACS, a surgical oncologist and chief of the department of gastrointestinal surgery and endoscopy at Roswell Park.

"What was surprising is that when you have people with familial pancreatic cancer and they present at a younger age, [smoking] seems to be an added risk factor contributing to the malignant transformation," he explained.

In several experiments reported in the Dec. 20 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Craig Logsdon, Ph.D., of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center here, and colleagues, found that:

• Cromolyn binds to S100P, a protein that is over-expressed in pancreatic cancer and is associated with tumor growth and invasion.
• S100P itself binds to the receptor for advanced glycation end-products (or RAGE) to initiate downstream signaling that leads to tumor growth. The researchers showed that cromolyn blocks that interaction in vitro.
• In mice with tumors that express S100P, the medication, in combination with the standard chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer, Gemzar (gemcitabine), sharply reduced tumor growth.
• Finally, in tumors that do not express S100P, cromolyn had no effect.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Eating lots of sugar and sugar-sweetened foods could increase a person's likelihood of developing cancer of the pancreas, by far one of the deadliest types of cancer, Swedish researchers report.

Dr. Susanna C. Larsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and her colleagues found that pancreatic cancer was significantly more likely to strike men and women who added the most sugar to their food and consumed the greatest quantities of soft drinks.

The researchers followed 77,797 men and women aged 45 to 83 for an average of about seven years. Those who reported eating five or more servings of added sugar daily, for example sugar added to tea, coffee or cereal, were 69 percent more likely to develop pancreatic cancer than those who never added sugar to their food or drink.

Two previous studies found positive associations between tooth loss or periodontitis (inflammation of the gums around the teeth) and pancreatic cancer. However, “residual confounding” by smoking and other known risk factors may have accounted for the findings.

To investigate further, Dr. Dominique S. Michaud of Harvard School of Public Health, Boston and colleagues analyzed 16 years of health data on nearly 52,000 male doctors in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. This ongoing study, initiated in 1986, is looking at lifestyle factors related to cancer and other chronic diseases.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institute studied the diets of almost 80,000 men and women between 1997 and 2005. A total of 131 developed pancreatic cancer, a deadly form of the disease that is difficult to treat.

“The researchers have now been able to show that the risk of developing pancreatic cancer is related to the amount of sugar in the diet,” the institute said in a statement.

by Jacki Donaldson, The Cancer Blog

My mom's best friend died from pancreatic cancer just three months after her diagnosis with the disease. One of my co-workers lost her mother to the same disease just weeks after diagnosis. Another co-worker's husband lost his battle with pancreatic cancer after a 15-month all-out fight. And a family friend has somehow been surviving this deadly disease for years now. He's the exception, defying the odds rarely in favor of long-term survival.

About 33,730 people will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2006. Many of them -- 32,300 -- will die from the disease that is rarely caught early. Pancreatic cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer death in the United States.

By the time a person exhibits symptoms of pancreatic cancer, the cancer has typically reached an unmanageable size and has spread to other organs. And because the pancreas is deep inside the body, doctors cannot see or feel tumors during routine exams. There are no blood tests that detect this cancer, and tumor marker tests often do not show indications of the disease until the cancer is advanced.

More than two decades later, Queensland Cancer Fund researchers are about to launch a study into whether the same bacteria interacts with a person's genes and the environment to increase their risk of pancreatic cancer.

Epidemiologist Rachel Neale, lead researcher on the project, said the study hinged on Queenslanders' willingness to take part in the study, which will select its 1000 participants randomly from the electoral roll.