Recently in Cancer Prevention Research Category

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates obesity to be a contributing factor to millions of dollars in health care costs and anywhere from 100,000 to 400,000 deaths a year. Easy access to less healthy foods such as fast food has helped widen the gap between ethnic groups when it comes to body mass index (BMI), according to researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

A study, published this week in the American Journal of Public Health, found African-American adults living close to a fast food restaurant are more likely to have a higher BMI than those living farther away. The study also found that those living within 2 miles of a fast food restaurant with income of $40,000 or less were strongly associated with having a higher BMI.

A person is considered overweight with a BMI between 25 and 29, and considered obese with a measurement of 30 and over. Current research shows that African-Americans experience the highest rate of obesity with 38.8 percent of black men being obese and 58.5 percent of black women being obese.

"In fact, African-American women have the highest rates of obesity compared to Caucasians and Hispanics in the U.S.," said Lorraine Reitzel, Ph.D., assistant professor in MD Anderson's Department of Health Disparities Research and lead investigator on the study. 

  MD Anderson scientists Jim Allison and Hagop Kantarjian, at left, and Guillermina Lozano and Gabriel Hortobagyi, at right, won four of 14 individual awards for senior scientists at the AAACR Annual Meeting 2013 in Washington, D.C.

Highlights

Scientists and clinicians from across MD Anderson presented their latest research findings at the AACR Annual Meeting 2013 in Washington, D.C. 

A record six scientists, from post-doctoral fellows to junior faculty to senior investigators, won awards at the meeting run by the American Association for Cancer Research, the oldest and largest organization dedicated to cancer research in the world.

By the numbers, MD Anderson faculty members, post-docs and graduate students presented (follow link to Advanced Search, type MD Anderson in institution box):

• 160 research posters in 152 poster sessions.
• 25 oral presentations or invited talks
• 10 educational sessions
• 4 lectures tied to major awards.

Highlighted work included research by Xifeng Wu, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology, showing that low bilirubin levels in the blood are a sign of high risk for lung cancer among male smokers.

Elsa Flores, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Her presentations included one that shows p63 and p73 can provide back-up tumor suppression when their more famous sibling, p53, is inactivated.  However, they also need to be protected from themselves or they might shut down all three tumor-blocking genes.

Ellen Gritz, Ph.D., chair and professor of the Department of Behavioral Sciences, co-authored a new AACR statement urging physicians to more closely monitor their patients' tobacco use and to provide smoking cessation information during clinical visits. 

Smoking remains the leading cause of preventable illness and death in the United States, so the health benefits of quitting are substantial. The majority of smokers are motivated to quit and more than half of all smokers attempt to quit each year. Sadly, only a small minority succeeds.

 

Researchers at MD Anderson are working to change this by changing the culture of how they reach self-admitted smokers with a new approach aimed at connecting through family practice clinics.

 

A collaboration involving MD Anderson researchers, the Texas Quitline and Kelsey-Seybold Clinics targeted smokers and their enrollment in tobacco treatment programs by directly connecting smokers with cessation quit lines.

 

Ask-Advise-Connect

 

Ask-Advise-Connect, a new approach designed to efficiently link smokers with cessation treatment, showed a significant increase in tobacco treatment enrollment by smokers who were directly contacted by quit line staff, according to results published online today in JAMA Internal Medicine. 

 

JAMA published a video interview Feb. 27 with study principal investigator Jennifer Irvin Vidrine, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Health Disparities Research at MD Anderson.

 

Trusting neighbors and community may aid smoking cessation in African-American smokers, accordingly to a study published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, a publication of the Society of Behavioral Medicine.

MD Anderson researchers collected data from 397 African-Americans seeking treatment to quit smoking to determine if there was a significant relationship between social cohesion and smoking cessation. The study examined if social cohesion -- the self-reported connectedness and trust felt between neighbors -- was directly linked to smoking abstinence in African-American smokers actively trying to quit, and if psychosocial mediators played a role in those relations.

"We know from previous research that despite later smoking initiation and a lower rate of smoking, African-American smokers are more likely to develop smoking-related diseases and to die from them than are Caucasians," said Lorraine Reitzel, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Health Disparities Research at MD Anderson Cancer Center.  "Investigating factors that affect smoking cessation within this population is important to increase our understanding of how to reduce smoking-related health disparities among this group."

More than 45,000 African-Americans die in the United States from smoking related cancers per year.

Pre-quit, quit-day and post-quit

Participants were followed over a six-month period during three stages of the study: pre-quit, quit-day and post-quit. During the first stage, data was collected on demographics including educational level and employment status, as well as tobacco dependence, so that known effects of these things on smoking cessation could be controlled for in the data analyses.

A simple measure of liver function routinely taken via blood tests at physical exams and other doctor's visits turns out to be highly predictive of the likelihood of developing liver cancer.

Scientists at MD Anderson and in Taiwan conducted a massive prospective analysis of comprehensive medical, demographic and lifestyle data from 428,584 people in Taiwan from 1994 to 2008.

"These two enzymes alone predicted 91 percent of liver cancer cases in our prospective study," said senior author Xifeng Wu, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of MD Anderson's Department of Epidemiology. "If our research is confirmed in other studies, we'd have a measure for liver cancer risk that's easy to apply via a simple blood test that's already in widespread clinical use."

While hepatitis B and C infection are risk predictors for those considered at high likelihood to develop liver cancer, in this study of a general population, levels of two enzymes emerged as unsurpassed predictors of risk.

By: Raymond DuBois, M.D., Ph.D.

We have known for the past two decades that aspirin and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) use reduces the risk of colorectal and other cancers. Today the Lancet published new reports indicating that low dose daily aspirin reduces the risk of distant metastasis of several cancers (Lancet Early Online Publication.)

The data came from 51 trials that included over 77,000 patients.

This protective effect appears to occur within 3-5 years of beginning aspirin use. It was previously thought that this protective effect would take up to 10 years to have an impact. These trials were originally designed to compare aspirin with no treatment for the prevention of heart disease.

In carefully looking at the data it became apparent that regular aspirin use reduced the risk of colorectal cancer as well as esophageal, gastric, biliary and breast cancer. People using 75-300 mg per day were found to have a significant reduction in the total number of cancer cases. Aspirin also reduced the risk of cancer death by 15% within 5 years and people using aspirin for longer duration had a 37% reduction in risk.

By Katrina Burton, MD Anderson Staff Writer

Tobacco use has long been known to cause lung cancer and increased morbidity in smokers. A study sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) recently revealed the positive impact of U.S.-initiated tobacco control policies and programs with the prevention of 795,000 lung cancer deaths from 1975 through 2000.

Researchers at MD Anderson and Rice University collaborated as one of six lung cancer modeling groups for the NCI-sponsored Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network Consortium. They applied a comparative modeling approach in which detailed smoking histories of 30- to 84-year-olds born from 1890 to 1970 were related to lung cancer mortality in mathematical models.

Using these models, researchers analyzed the impact of changes in smoking patterns resulting from tobacco control activities initiated after the U.S. Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health was released in 1964.

Powel Brown on 10 Years' Progress in Cancer Prevention

When online news service MedPage Today wanted some perspective on cancer prevention progress during the past decade and prospects for greater improvement, it turned to Powel Brown, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of MD Anderson's Department of Clinical Cancer Prevention.

Brown was scientific program chairman for the 10th annual American Association for Cancer Research Frontiers in Cancer Prevention meeting recently in Boston.

Watch Charles Bankhead's interview here. 

Anas Younes on Treatment of Hodgkin Lymphoma Relapse

Everyday Health  reported a story Friday on Hodgkin lymphoma relapse when its co-host, former Survivor champ and professional soccer player Ethan Zohen found himself encountering a recurrence. 

Anas Younes, M.D., professor in MD Anderson's Department of Lymphoma and Myeloma, provided expert commentary on therapeutic options for recurrent or resistant disease.

Read the story here.