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At the 95th annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in

Orlando / Fla the results of a study regarding the effect of exercise on breast cancer survival rates was presented. Dr. Michelle D. Holmes and co-workers (Harvard University in Boston) reported about data from the Nurses' Health Study. About 2000 patients with breast cancer were identified in the period of 1984 to 1996 who were followed until the end of 2002. At that time 209 had died from their breast cancer. The investigators were able to control the data for all the other factors such as smoking, obesity, and many other factors except for the amount of exercise per week that these women were doing. The highest risk group was the one that did not exercise and the death rate of this group was set as 100% as can be seen in this table, which I constructed based on the published data.

Percentage of death rates decrease significantly with exercise

The various groups as indicated on the bottom of the table were the hours exercised per week from 0 hours to more than 15 hours per week (this was expressed as metabolic equivalent of a brisk walk). It can be seen that survival from breast cancer can be influenced by as little as 3 to 9 hours of a brisk walk per week (about 20% reduction in death rate) and reaches a plateau at 9 to 15 hours of exercise per week (around 50% reduction in death rate). The authors of the study said that when the data was expressed as recurrence of breast cancer, the same results were obtained. This study would indicate that even 30 minutes of exercise per day will reduce mortality in a patient with breast cancer. Also, it it known from other studies that exercise will be more effective in terms of cancer prevention in general including prevention of breast cancer.

Link to breast cancer chapter of the Net Health Book.

Acupuncture For Headaches Found Effective

For many years it was merely a clinical impression that some headache sufferers were helped by acupuncture. Over the years many attempted to show that acupuncture works for headaches, but the studies were done with too few patients to reach statistically meaningful results.

In a recent English study that was published by Andrew J Vickers et al. in the British Medical Journal on March 27, 2004 patients were randomly assigned to a conventional headache treatment protocol or to treatment with acupuncture. 401 patients were enrolled in this randomized study and the patients came from general practitioners in Wales and England. The patients all had similarly severe headaches or chronic headaches and had mainly migraines, but also tension type headaches. Several universities took part in the design of the study to ensure that the Cochrane criteria of evidence based medicine were adhered to. Headaches were measured according to a score that consisted of detailed standardized questionaires. Treatment with acupuncture consisted of 12 treatments over 3 months. The control headache group was treated with the usual care.

The headache sufferers were assessed at the 12 month point. There were significant differences in favor of the acupuncture treated patients. The acupuncture group had on average 22 fewer days of headaches per year than the control group. This resulted in 15% less medication use, 25% fewer doctor visits and 15% fewer sick days. Acupuncture treated headache sufferers felt physically more active, they had more energy and they felt a positive change in their health.

British Medical Journal: BMJ 2004;328:744 (27 March).

Lycopene Of Tomatoes Fights Cancer Cells

Dr. John Erdman Jr. from the University of Illinois has done epidemiological studies that suggest that the red color of tomatoes, which is provided by lycopenes, is only effective against prostate cancer, if the whole tomato is consumed.

The professor of food science and human nutrition found that other phytochemicals in the tomato act in concert with lycopene to protect against cancer. To prove this more conclusively, he designed an experiment involving 194 rats with prostate cancer into three groups.

Group 1 was the control group without any detectable lycopene in their diet. Group 2 was fed the control diet with purified lycopene. Group 3 was fed the control diet with ground-up tomato paste (with seeds and skins). Group 3 was the only group where the risk of dying from prostate cancer was reduced by 30%. Group 2 rats had the same high death rates as the control group. These results were recently published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Dr. Erdman concluded that taking lycopene is not as effective as eating the whole tomato to prevent cancer of the prostate. He also suggested to use whole tomato products in tomato juice, in salads, pasta and pizzas.

Based on an article in the Medical Post, Vol 40, No.8, Feb.24, 2004 (page 33).

Link to prostate cancer chapter of the Net Health Book.

Breast Cancer And Miscarriages? Fear-Mongering Debunked

For many years there were conflicting reports about the emotionally charged topic of whether miscarriages (=spontaneous abortions) or induced abortions (also simply known as abortions) would lead to an increased risk for these women later in life. The problem was that the studies could not be directly compared because they differed in size, in age group and whether the women had one or more children or none.

The studies also differed in respect to whether they were prospective or restrospective. In this context a prospective study is one where it was known at the outset before the women developed breast cancer whether or not there was a history of a spontaneous or induced abortion in the past. A retrospective study would be one where a group of women with established breast cancer would be asked retrospectively whether or not they had a history of abortions (spontaneous or induced).

It turns out that the discrepancies between these studies in the past were largely because of the significant difference between the data of the unreliable retrospective studies and the very reliable prospective studies.

On March 27, 2004 the Lancet reported about a study that had been undertaken by the Collaborative Group on Hormonal Factors in Breast Cancer (seat of the Secretariat in Oxford, England). This study involved hundreds of scientists and clinicians from the major Cancer Clinics around the world who gathered the world-wide epidemiological evidence about breast cancer and pooled the data regarding 53 studies from 16 countries.

A total of 83,000 women with breast cancer around the world had been included in this study. The data was separated into sub-categories. For instance, 44,000 women were included in the prospective branch of the study and 33,000 in the retrospective branch. The data was carefully controlled for the factors mentioned above and many other differences to ensure that the data could be compared (rules of evidence-based medicine).

The surprise finding was that there was no statistical difference regarding the risk for developing breast cancer in the prospective branch of the study between the group of women who never were pregnant, those who had one or more children and those who had miscarriages or abortions in the past. However, the retrospective studies reported a higher incidence of breast cancer because of an observer bias. The researchers and clinicians concluded that the data of the restrospective studies were unreliable because they were not carefully controlled and there likely was more reliable reporting of the women who had developed breast cancer than the control groups who likely underreported their histories thus leading to misleading conclusions.

Summary: Women do not have a higher risk of developing breast cancer following spontaneous or induced abortions. Forget all of the fear-mongering that you may have heard in the past in the popular press.

Lancet 2004; 363: 1007-16.

Sucking Bite Does Not Remove Venom

How often have you heard the story that you should suck out the venom from a snakebite or insect bite. Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco have put this to the test. They injected a "mock venom", which mimicked the composition of a venom without the poisonous effect, into eight male volunteers. This mock venom was radioactively labelled, so it could be traced. A vacuum pump, which simulated the sucking out of the wound, was applied after a few minutes and the amount of venom extraction was calculated by measuring the radioactivity of the extracted mock venom. To the surprise of the researchers only 2% of the mock venom had been sucked out on average.

Venom alert: Attempting to suck out a bite wound will not remove enough venom to make any difference for the total body venom load. It is much more important to not waste any time by applying a tight tourniquet above the bite wound (between the bite and the heart) and to call for an ambulance to rush the patient to the nearest Emergency Department where antitoxin for the venom treatment is available. To suck out a wound would only add mouth bacteria to the wound and could result in serious infections in addition to the poison.

Medical Post, Vol.40, No.12, March 23, 2004 (page 66).