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American Cancer Society Guidelines for the Early Detection of Cancer
American Cancer Society Guidelines for the Early Detection of Cancer
The American Cancer Society recommends these cancer screening guidelines for most adults. Screening tests are used to find cancer before a person has any symptoms.
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Diet and Physical Activity: What’s the Cancer Connection?
Diet and Physical Activity: What’s the Cancer Connection?
How much do daily habits like diet and exercise affect your risk for cancer? Much more than you might think. Research has shown that poor diet and not being active are 2 key factors that can increase a person’s cancer risk. The good news is that you do something about this.
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TREATMENT
Cancer treatment is improving, saving lives and extending survival for many people. Depending on various factors, treatment options may include surgery, radiation, immunotherapy, chemotherapy, hormone therapy, or targeted, local therapy, among others. These treatments might be used alone or in combination. Clinical trials evaluate the benefits of new therapies and broaden the options available to patients.
This section includes treatment trends for cancer sites for which there are available data trends and definitive treatment guidelines based on rigorous evidence of benefit to patients, including bladder, breast, colorectal, kidney, lung, ovarian, and prostate cancers.
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Know about your health
You’re smart. You’re responsible. You’re highly motivated to keep your family healthy – and having adequate health insurance coverage is part of that. But learning what you need to know about insurance in order to make good decisions can be overwhelming. That’s where we can help.
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Blood Test Could Predict Metastasis Risk In Melanoma Scientists at Yale University have identified a set of plasma biomarkers that could reasonably predict the risk of metastasis among patients with melanoma
,according to findings published in Clinical Cancer Research,a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. "The rate at which melanoma is increasing is dramatic, and there is a huge number of patients under surveillance," said Harriet Kluger, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. "Our current method of surveillance includes periodic imaging, which creates huge societal costs." Melanoma is the fifth most common cancer in men and the seventh most common cancer in women. It is estimated that 68,130 people in the United States were diagnosed in 2010, and 8,700 died. With proper screening, melanoma can often be caught early enough to be removed with surgery, and mortality typically comes when the cancer metastasizes. The risk of metastasis varies from less than 10 percent for those with stage 1A melanoma, to as high as 70 percent with stage 3C. Patients with melanoma are typically subjected to a combination of imaging tests, blood tests and physical examinations, but there is no clear consensus on how often these tests should occur or how reliable they are. Kluger and colleagues tested the plasma of 216 individuals, including 108 patients with metastatic melanoma and 108 patients with stage 1 or 2 disease. They identified seven plasma biomarkers: CEACAM, ICAM-1, osteopontin, MIA, GDF-15, TIMP-1 and S100B. All of these biomarkers were higher in patients with metastatic melanoma than patients with early-stage disease. In fact, 76 percent of patients with early-stage disease had no elevations at all whereas 83 percent of metastatic patients had elevations of at least one marker. Researchers calculated that the area under the curve, a measure of the test's reliability, was 0.898. Area under the curve calculations rate from .5 to 1, with 1 being optimal and .5 being useless. "This finding will need to be confirmed prospectively before it is used in the clinic, but it shows that such testing is possible," said Kluger. Source: American Association for Cancer Research (AACR)
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