Tag Archive for: well-balanced diet

Can Stomach Cancer Risk Be Reduced by Treatment and Lifestyle Changes?

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Can Stomach Cancer Risk Be Reduced by Treatment and Lifestyle Changes? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

Are there treatments and lifestyle changes that can reduce stomach cancer risk? Expert Dr. Joo Ha Hwang from Stanford Medicine discusses key risk factors of gastric cancer, incidence rates in some population groups, and recommended diet modifications to reduce risk.

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“…for anybody, not just, if you’re Asian or Latinx, talk to your physician about a healthy diet, because what I basically talk to my patients about is I counsel them on minimizing salt intake increasing fiber, higher intake of fresh fruits and vegetables, a well-balanced diet. I don’t think you need to go to an extreme, there are no supplements that you need to take that will protect you from developing gastric cancer, probiotics really aren’t of benefit either.”

See More from [ACT]IVATED Gastric Cancer

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What Are Key Risk Factors for Stomach Cancer?

 What Stomach Cancer Care Obstacles Do Asian and Latinx Patients Face?

What Stomach Cancer Care Obstacles Do Asian and Latinx Patients Face?

Transcript:

Lisa Hatfield:

So you mentioned there is a treatment for H. pylori, does that significantly reduce the risk of gastric cancer then, if that’s treated?

Dr. Joo Ha Hwang:

Yes. It really depends on when you catch it. So if you catch H. pylori before it’s done, its damage to the stomach, it essentially brings your risk of gastric cancer back down to the baseline population, which is very, very low. If you catch H. pylori infection after it’s caused problems, you still decrease the risk, you kind of flatten the curve but you’re still at increased risk, if the damage to the stomach has already been done and you’ve already progressed onto intestinal metaplasia.

Lisa Hatfield:

Dr. Hwang, how do diet and lifestyle contribute to the incidence of gastric cancer in Asian and Latinx populations?

Dr. Joo Ha Hwang:

The main reason the diet affects, the risk of gastric cancer, is the salt content, to the best, that we know, and so we know that high salt content, for some reason increases your risk of gastric cancer, we think that maybe salts, somehow interacts with the mucosal barrier in the stomach and allows for H. pylori to become more invasive, we don’t know the specific mechanism for that but there was a recent study that came out of England that showed that if you added salt to your diet on a regular basis, that you increased your risk of developing gastric cancer by about 40 percent. Now, to put that into context, compared to the baseline population, if you have H. pylori infection, you increase your risk of developing gastric cancer by 2 to 300 percent.

And if you come from Korea or Japan, your risk of developing gastric cancer is probably somewhere between 8 to 1200 percent higher than the baseline population. So a 40 percent increase because of diet alone is a modest increase, compared to H. pylori infection and to some degree, your ethnicity. So that’s really both diet and lifestyle. There’s some data also that suggests, processed meats also increase your risk of gastric cancer, it’s always hard to study diet and its role in developing any type of cancer, because getting that data, specific enough is very difficult, but it makes a lot of sense since your stomach is basically the first thing that that food sees and we know that food can be somewhat toxic. On the flip side, things that we know to be healthy are the common sense stuff like fresh fruits, fresh vegetables.

We know that that is somewhat protective. And so how I counsel my patients and my activation code for this would be that for anybody, not just, if you’re Asian or Latinx, talk to your physician about a healthy diet, because what I basically talk to my patients about is I counsel them on minimizing salt intake increasing fiber, higher intake of fresh fruits and vegetables, a well-balanced diet. I don’t think you need to go to an extreme, there are no supplements that you need to take that will protect you from developing gastric cancer, probiotics really aren’t of benefit either. So in terms of diet and lifestyle, I think that those are just the main take-home points.

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Can Lifestyle or Supplements Impact CLL Treatment Response?

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Can Lifestyle or Supplements Impact CLL Treatment Response? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

Can chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients use supplements or lifestyle changes to impact treatment response? Expert Dr. Danielle Brander shares her perspective and information from other cancer studies.

Dr. Danielle Brander is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Hematologic Malignancies & Cellular Therapy at Duke University Medical Center. Learn more about Dr. Danielle Brander.

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Transcript:

Lisa Hatfield:

So we have another patient who is concerned about chances of relapse and is asking if there are any lifestyle changes through diet and supplements or anything that you can speak to that may enhance their response or their duration response to the treatment?

Dr. Danielle Brander:

Yeah. So a very very great question to bring about. And this is the one area, understandably where many of us feel frustrated because we can’t tell patients specifically that this trial has been done and says this specific diet is helpful or this specific lifestyle change is helpful to make the treatment work for longer. I think some of that is because some of the general advice we give meaning maintaining daily activity or a well-balanced diet sound non-specific or simple, but I think do help in patients staying in an overall general health wellness so that they can benefit from the treatment and potentially have less side effects from the therapy. 

But getting back to the question we just talked about, I think certainly trials or studies really need to be continuing to look at this, because I think there likely are things that we can be more specific to patients about. There are studies looking at physical fitness and exercise regimens not necessarily specific to CLL, although there are studies being done in that space, but to other cancers showing that physical activity and exercise can help even for patients not on treatment maintain control of their cancer. So general daily activity and exercise are important in studies that look at how do you tailor that to an individual I think are important too.

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Thriving Not Just Surviving: A Breast Cancer Expert’s Perspective

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Thriving Not Just Surviving: A Breast Cancer Expert’s Perspective from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

How can breast cancer patients not just survive but thrive? Expert Dr. Bhuvaneswari Ramaswamy shares actionable patient advice to strive toward optimal health while living with breast cancer.

Dr. Bhuvaneswari Ramaswamy is the Section Chief of Breast Medical Oncology and the Director of the Medical Oncology Fellowship Program in Breast Cancer at The Ohio State College of Medicine. Learn more about this expert here.

See More from Thrive Breast Cancer

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Transcript:

Katherine:                     

We start all of our Thrive Series with the same question. In your experience, what does it mean to thrive with breast cancer?

Dr. Ramaswamy:          

That’s a great question. I think it’s an important one because we always talk about surviving breast cancer, and that’s obviously the most important thing. We all want to survive, but we all also want more than that. We don’t want to just live, we want quality of life.  

And I think one thing that to remember is as soon as the breast cancer diagnosis is done, it’s in part – it’s difficult to say that you can thrive immediately. So, your focus is on really getting through the treatments and making sure it’s all done. So, at that time, managing the toxicities and getting through the stresses of going through the treatments and surgery, radiation, et cetera takes  over everything else. But as you finish that off you, you want to focus on what are the ways you can try to get back to the life that you had prior to breast cancer.

Now it’s difficult and it’s almost impossible to forget the big C word in your life. So, that’s going to hang and that’s going to kind of make anything you look at your perspective as slightly different. I mean, every pain could be worrisome because could it be a reference? Has the cancer spread? Or every bad news about another person could you, could transport that about yourself and then kind of worry about what could happen to you.

Every visit to the doctor, and particularly your oncologist, is going to   bring back memories. So, there are certain things that you can’t take away, but time can heal those. But what we talk about thriving is that you looking at factors that is going to make you and your body healthy. That is going to be exercise, being engaged in  whether your work or your family work and being joyful and seek what brings you joy, whether it’s friends, your work or your family.

And make sure you make time for that. And also eating right and diet is an important aspect of that. Not doing inflammatory diets such as highly fatty diets or meat-containing diet, but really kind of looking at your diet and your weight and your exercise. And trying to also discuss with your team about what are the symptoms you are having and how we can support you to mitigate those   symptoms. And really having conversations and somebody you can confide with to both manage your physical aspects as well as the emotional aspects.

And really kind of thriving and becoming   an advocate for yourself as well as for others who have breast cancer is what I would say is truly thriving with breast – with the diagnosis of breast cancer.

Have There Been Advances in Screening for a Breast Cancer Recurrence?

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Have There Been Advances in Screening for a Breast Cancer Recurrence? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

Have there been recent advances in screening for breast cancer recurrence? Expert Dr. Bhuvaneswari Ramaswamy explains where things stand with screening, reviews advances that could be approved soon, and shares her advice for pro-active lifestyle steps that patients can take.

Dr. Bhuvaneswari Ramaswamy is the Section Chief of Breast Medical Oncology and the Director of the Medical Oncology Fellowship Program in Breast Cancer at The Ohio State College of Medicine. Learn more about this expert here.

See More from Thrive Breast Cancer

Related Resources:

Why Should Breast Cancer Patients Engage in Care Decisions?

 How Is Metastatic Breast Cancer Treated?

 What Are the Treatment Options for Early Stage Breast Cancer?

Transcript:

Katherine:

Susan wants to know, have there been any advances in imaging or screening for  a recurrence? And can anything be done to help prevent a recurrence?

Dr. Ramaswamy:          

So, let me answer the first question. So, we did – we have done clinical trials where patients got imaging that meaning CT scans even if they don’t have symptoms every four months, as opposed to the other group had only scans when they got symptoms. And we looked at two outcomes. One is, are they surviving longer? Because that is, of course, our primary goal. But actually, the secondary goal was, is their quality of life better?

Katherine:

No.

Dr. Ramaswamy:

Many of us knew that survival is not going to improve because we understand this disease. So, you did not. The two groups do not have any difference in survival, but we were very surprised to see even the quality of life was not improved. That’s because every time you have a scan, there’s a lot of anxiety what you’re going to say. And then if there is some ditzel somewhere that could be nothing at all, now they say, I’m not sure whether it’s inflammatory or metastatic. Now you have to go and biopsy. Now the biopsy can lead to some side, I mean, some complications, or sometimes we’ll say, no, we can’t biopsy it. We’re going to watch it closely.

Now it’s easy for me to say, and then I’ll walk out and go and see the next patient. But you are going to carry this heavy burden in your mind and think about, oh, my God, four months I’m going to wait. What if it’s grown? So, there’s a lot of anxiety that induces that we are not able to address. So, that’s why we don’t do routine imaging for all patients. But we have a very low threshold to do the imaging if you have symptoms that we are concerned about.

And I generally educate my patients any persistent progressive symptoms. So, two-piece persistent progressive symptom. Please call, don’t even wait for the next appointment, and then we’ll move forward from that. So, as far as imaging, I can’t say that we have a better tool to identify those little mats and do something better. But like I had said before in this particular meeting, we are now looking to see whether we can find that circulating tumor cells or circulating in tumor DNA.

And if that proves out to be good, we have some late FDA approval of a test. But if it is going to impact patients’ lives by doing this on a routine basis and we think we can start the treatment earlier and impact their outcomes, you are going to have another test that we can do, which is even simpler, which is just a blood draw test.

So, I think we are going in that direction, and we’ll know a little bit more soon. Now, your second question was, can we prevent a recurrence? So, everything that we are doing is to prevent a recurrence, right? Because if you think about it, your tumor is going to be removed by surgery, and so it’s out. And we are going to do additional radiation, which to just kind of pick those little cells if they’re left. And in certain circumstances, I would say in most circumstances we would do radiation. But we are also doing all these treatments that we talked about, chemotherapy, antiestrogen therapy. We are doing it longer. We are doing anti-HER2 therapy. We’re trying to pick those high-risk patients who didn’t respond so well. We are giving them more treatments to treat. They’re all to prevent a recurrence.

That’s what we are doing. But the – I’m – we did talk about two other things as well. Exercising, eating right, making sure you’re not gaining weight, and making sure you’re engaged because your reduced stress and lack of – increased happiness improves good cells in your body, less inflammation in your body, all of this will help. Okay? And no doubt all of this too is to help your – reduce your recurrence. But the thing is what we are not able to say to a patient is that, okay, we’ve done all this, 100 percent you’re not going to have a recurrence. We don’t have that level of confidence in what we do. We can say you reduced your risk of recurrence, but we can’t just say you have zero chance of recurrence. That’s where we still can improve and we’ll continue to do better, so.