Notable News | April 2019

You may want to do some yoga, especially if you are experiencing chronic stress. However, you can breath a sigh of relief about the positive research in bladder and prostate cancers reported this month. There’s even some super cool research that involves containing, rather than killing, cancer cells. Check it out.

Chronic stress is not good for anybody, but as livescience.com reports, it may be even more detrimental for cancer patients. Acute stress is normal on occasion to help us avoid danger, but chronic stress, which weakens the immune system, leads to changes in the body that could then lead to the development and progression of cancer. However, experts say we can’t be so fast to draw a link between stress and cancer because of the ways different people respond to stress. Some people are motivated by it; others sickened by it. Some experts believe it may not be the stress that leads to cancer, but rather the poor habits people adopt to cope with stress. While experts don’t yet agree that there is a clear and definitive line between chronic stress and cancer, there is evidence that taking measures to reduce stress is best for overall health. Find out more here.

Speaking of stress, cancer can be stressful. Many patients turn to alternative forms of healing to manage the affects of cancer or treatment, but medicalnewstoday.com says, that may be doing more harm than good. As many as one third of people living with cancer are using alternative or complementary therapies. The most common form of alternative therapies is the use of herbal supplements, which researchers found could be a problem because the ingredients of herbal supplements are not always known, and there is a concern that supplement ingredients could negatively interact with the medicines they are taking. For example, high levels of antioxidants may make radiation less effective. Yoga, however, is the one complementary method of treatment that seemed to help patients. You can learn more about the research involving alternative and complementary therapies here, and decide whether or not those methods are right for you.

Researchers are starting to decide that maybe killing all the cancer cells isn’t the best option for combating cancer, reports medicalnewstoday.com. Cancer cells evolve really fast, and some studies show that there is no way of killing them all. Researchers are looking at a new approach of treating cancer that involves preventing it from developing and spreading by containing it. They hope to use medication to make the cancer cells dormant and keep them that way, which could be useful in cancers, such as breast cancer, which is now considered a chronic cancer because it can come back many years later with secondary tumors. You can learn more about this unique approach here.

Other findings this month bring good news for bladder cancer patients, reports seekingalpha.com. The FDA has approved the Johnson & Johnson drug, Balversa, for patients with metastatic bladder cancer. The approval was based on a trial that resulted in a 32 percent overall response rate. The patients who are eligible for Balversa, have metastatic bladder cancer with specific genetic alterations, but there is hope that it will eventually be tested on other types of cancers. Learn more here.

More good news comes from British scientists who have discovered 17 genes for diagnosing prostate cancer, reports dailymail.co.uk. Combined with the six genes already known to be linked to prostate cancer, there are now 23 genes that can be screened through a spit or blood test. Find more information about the research and what it means for diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer here.

The not-so-good news reported this month is the increase in lung cancer among non-smokers — especially women. An in depth look at this growing issue can be found at theguardian.com here.

The ups and downs of cancer research news can be stressful for anyone, so to alleviate that stress, let’s all stay informed, and maybe take to our yoga mats. Until next month, namaste.