Do You Read All Of Our Cancer Blogs?

Do you read all of the blogs published by medicineworld.org? Many of our bloggers are busy keeping you updated on the various health related topics. We publish the following blogs at this time.

Cancer blog: I manage the cancer blog with lots of help and support form other bloggers. Through this cancer blog my friends and I try to bring stories of hope for patients with cancer. The cancer blog often republishes important blog posts from other cancer related blogs at Medicineworld.org. If you are searching for a blog that covers wide variety of cancer topics, this may be the one for you.

Breast cancer blog: Breast cancer blog is run by Emily and other bloggers and they bring you the latest stories, news and events that are related to breast cancer. Increasing awareness about breast cancer among women and in the general population is the main goal of this breast cancer blog.

Lung cancer blog: Lung cancer blog is managed by Scott with the help of other bloggers. Through this blog Scott and his friends constantly remind the readers about the dangers of smoking. It's a never-ending struggle against this miserable disease with which a social stigma of smoking is associated.

Colon cancer blog: Colon cancer blog is run by Sue and other bloggers. Sue brings a personal touch to the colon cancer blog since her mother died of colon cancer few years ago. She writes about stories, research news and advances in treatment related to colon cancer.

Prostate cancer blog: Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among American men. American Cancer Society estimates that over 230,000 new cases of prostate cancer occur in the United state every year. This important blog about prostate cancer is run by Mark and other bloggers. This blog brings news, stories, and other personal observations related to prostate cancer.

Medicineworld.org publishes a diabetes watch blog and this blog is run by JoAnn other bloggers. This diabetes watch blog brings you the latest in the field of diabetes. This includes personal stories, advances in diagnosis and treatment, and other observations about diabetes. Improving awareness about diabetes is an important mission of this group.

Janet      

Mechanisms Of Cancer Generation

Johns Hopkins researcher, with colleagues in Sweden and at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, suggests that the traditional view of cancer as a group of diseases with markedly different biological properties arising from a series of alterations within a cell's nuclear DNA may have to give way to a more complicated view. In the recent issue of Nature Reviews Genetics, available online Dec. 21, he and colleagues suggest that cancers instead begin with "epigenetic" alterations to stem cells.

"We're not contradicting the view that genetic changes occur in the development of cancers, but there also are epigenetic changes and those come first," says lead author Andrew Feinberg, M.D., M.P.H., King Fahd Professor of Medicine and director of the Center for Epigenetics in Common Human Disease at Johns Hopkins.

Cells affected by epigenetic changes look normal under a microscope at low levels of resolution, Feinberg says, "but if you look carefully at the genome, you find there are subtle changes." By tracking these changes, he suggests, doctors potentially could treat people before tumors develop in much the same way as cardiologists prescribe cholesterol-lowering drugs to help prevent heart disease.

Epigenetic changes -- those that don't affect the gene's sequence of DNA but change the gene in other ways -- influence a wide variety of human diseases, including cancer, birth defects and psychiatric conditions. Epigenetic alterations include the turning off or quieting of genes that normally suppress cancer and the turning on of oncogenes to produce proteins that set off cancerous behavior.

Epigenetic changes are found in normal cells of patients with cancer and are associated with cancer risk, Feinberg notes.

As one example, as per a research findings published in the Feb. 24, 2005, online version of Science, Feinberg and his colleagues in the United States, Sweden and Japan reported that mice engineered to have a double dose of insulin-like growth factor 2 (IGF2) had more primitive precursor cells in the lining of the colon than normal mice. When these mice also carried a colon-cancer-causing genetic mutation, they developed twice as a number of tumors as mice with normal IGF2 levels. The extra IGF2 stemmed not from a genetic problem, or mutation, but from an epigenetic problem that improperly turned on the copy of the IGF2 gene that should have remained off.

Feinberg and colleagues propose that cancers develop via a three-step process. First, there is an epigenetic disruption of progenitor cells within an organ or tissue, altered by abnormal regulation of tumor-progenitor genes. This leads to a population of cells ready to cause new growth.

The second step involves an initiating mutation within the population of epigenetically disrupted progenitor cells at the earliest stages of new cell growth, such as the rearrangement of chromosomes in the development of leukemia. This mutation normally has been considered the first step in cancer development.

The third step is genetic and epigenetic instability, which leads to increased tumor evolution.

A number of of the properties of advanced tumors, including the ability to spread, or metastasize, are inherent properties of the progenitor cells that give rise to the primary tumor, Feinberg notes. These properties do not necessarily require other mutations to occur.

"Greater attention should be paid to the apparently normal cells of patients with cancer or those at risk for cancer, as they might be crucial targets for epigenetic alteration and might be an important target for prevention and screening," he says.

Authors on the review are Andrew Feinberg of Johns Hopkins; Rolf Ohlsson of Uppsala University, Sweden; and Steven Henikoff of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.


Source: Johns Hopkins Medicine

Did you know?
Johns Hopkins researcher, with colleagues in Sweden and at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, suggests that the traditional view of cancer as a group of diseases with markedly different biological properties arising from a series of alterations within a cell's nuclear DNA may have to give way to a more complicated view. In the recent issue of Nature Reviews Genetics, available online Dec. 21, he and colleagues suggest that cancers instead begin with "epigenetic" alterations to stem cells.