Special thanks to Zac Efron @Z…

By admin | February 24, 2010

Special thanks to Zac Efron @ZacZic for his support of young adults with @StupidCancer. Your fans are *all* over this. http://bit.ly/btmQdR
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Wow that was quick. Zac Efron’…

By admin | February 24, 2010

Submitted by the stupid cancer blog

Wow that was quick. Zac Efron’s support of our @StupidCancer wristbands spread through the web like wildfire. His fan forums have lit up.

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Any Zac Efron fans out there? …

By admin | February 24, 2010

Submitted by the stupid cancer blog

Any Zac Efron fans out there? Guess which cancer charity he’s supporting? You guessed it! Check this out – http://bit.ly/btmQdR @zaczic

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More good news from opposite w…

By admin | February 23, 2010

Submitted by the stupid cancer blog

More good news from opposite world. “Access to Mammograms Drops After Guidelines Change” #fantastic #stupidcancer http://bit.ly/9doSHh

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Brain radiation may be hazardous to your mind.

By admin | February 18, 2010

Submitted by Dr.Kattlove’s Cancer Blog

Early in my practice, one of my patients, a 60 year old with lung cancer complained of headache. Her lung cancer had been cured by chemotherapy – she had what we call a small cell cancer, which is very sensitive to chemotherapy and can, at times, be cured.

But this less common form of lung cancer tends to spread quickly and widely. The chemotherapy probably killed most of the cancer cells that had fanned out through her body. But chemotherapy doesn’t usually penetrate into the brain and that was where the cancer had spread. A CT scan of her brain showed a tumor. The usual treatment at that time was radiation treatment to the whole brain. The reasoning was that if there was one tumor, there were probably more that we couldn’t see so it was better to get rid of them all. So that is what we did. She received 15 treatments to her head (brain), her headaches disappeared, and she seemed to be doing well.

I was kind of proud of this result. Treatment had apparently cured her of her cancer in the lung, prevented it from spreading elsewhere except to the brain and now we had taken care of that problem – until she came in one day a few months later and appeared a bit detached. After a couple of more visits, it became clear that she was losing her memory and by the end of a year, she needed total care in a nursing home – much like someone with advanced Alzheimer’s disease.

Eventually it became known that this was not an unusual result; many studies began reporting the loss of memory and mental deterioration in people who had been given radiation to the entire brain. Still, there was not much else we could do for people whose cancer had spread to their brain.

I was reminded of all this by an article appearing in the journal, Lancet Oncology (Volume 10, 2009). Since my early experience, a new form of radiation has been developed where the radiation beam is focused mainly on the tumor in the brain and spares the surrounding normal brain tissue. The study presented in this article treated patients like mine with either the focused radiation to the tumor or the focused radiation plus radiation to the whole brain. The whole brain was included in the study to see if preventing new tumors from arising would be better than the risk of memory loss.

But, just like with my patient, many of those getting the focused treatment and whole brain radiation began developing mental changes as early as four months after treatment compared to the patients who only got the focused treatment. In fact, the changes were so pronounced and occurred so regularly that the study was stopped and no more patients received the whole brain treatment.

But, this isn’t the final answer; although the patients who did not receive the whole brain radiation kept their wits, they also saw their tumors coming back in the brain more often.

Sad to say, when the cancer spreads to the brain there are no good options, only some less worse than others.
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In Media Res

By admin | February 16, 2010

Submitted by Jayne’s Breast Cancer Blog.com

East Coast 2010= snow, snow and more snow

I haven’t written a blog post here in quite some time. So I will start off just by mentioning that I am fine. In a few weeks I will be four years cancer-free. The uncomfortable truth is that when a cancer blogger stops blogging, it isn’t always because she has “moved on” from the cancer experience and is out living an enlightened life. Sometimes the blog just stops because she has been swept away by the disease.

More than a year ago, one of my breast cancer blogging friends stopped posting without explanation. I had been away from the message board where we had first become acquainted, and it wasn’t until I started sifting through old message board posts, looking for my fellow blogger, that I discovered that she had passed away. Her blog is still up and occasionally I stop in there and look at her exquisite nature photography, and I think about her and her family and I miss this woman who I never met.

The Young Survival Coalition occasionally provides a telephone support call called “Grief Matters…Let’s Talk About It.” While I have yet to be able to participate, I hold out hope that sooner or later I will get to be part of that call. The folks at the Young Survival Coalition recognize that those of us who open ourselves up to the breast cancer community risk grief on a regular basis.

If you are not familiar with the Young Survival Coalition, hop yourself over there. NOW! They have a fantastic new web design, too.

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