(Posted: 06/14/2012) - More than 400 leading experts in cancer survivorship convened today for a conference, Cancer Survivorship Research: Translating Science to Care, to focus on such current concerns as how obesity might not have the same effects on all cancer survivors, and the substantial and increasing economic burden of cancer survivorship in the United States. The conference is jointly sponsored by the American Cancer Society’s Behavioral Research Center, the National Cancer Institute’s Office of Cancer Survivorship, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

(Posted: 06/13/2012) - Microbes inhabit just about every part of the human body, living on the skin, in the gut, and up the nose. Sometimes they cause sickness, but most of the time, microorganisms live in harmony with their human hosts, providing vital functions essential for human survival. For the first time, a consortium of researchers organized by the National Institutes of Health has mapped the normal microbial make-up of healthy humans, producing numerous insights and even a few surprises.

(Posted: 06/07/2012) - Children and young adults scanned multiple times by computed tomography (CT), a commonly used diagnostic tool, have a small increased risk of leukemia and brain tumors in the decade following their first scan.

(Posted: 05/29/2012) - Experts have elaborated on a previously published checklist of 20 items -- including descriptions of design, methods, and analysis -- that researchers should address when publishing studies of prognostic markers. These markers are indicators that enable doctors to predict the behavior of a patient’s disease and may aid them in making therapy decisions. The recommendations were originally developed and published simultaneously in five journals in August 2005, to address widespread deficiencies in reporting of such studies, which sometimes has led to inaccurate or irreproducible conclusions.

(Posted: 05/21/2012) - The Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening Trial is a large, randomized study to determine whether the use of certain screening tests will reduce the risk of dying of those four cancers. In addition to answering questions about the screening tests, the PLCO asked questions about many aspects of the study participants’ health and collected biospecimens (blood and some tissues) to answer many other questions about cancer.

(Posted: 05/21/2012) - Study finds that flexible sigmoidoscopy is effective in reducing the rates of new cases and deaths due to colorectal cancer. Researchers found that overall colorectal cancer mortality was reduced by 26 percent and incidence was reduced by 21 percent as a result of screening with sigmoidoscopy.

(Posted: 05/16/2012) - Older adults who drank coffee -- caffeinated or decaffeinated -- had a lower risk of death overall than others who did not drink coffee, according a study by researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, and AARP.

(Posted: 05/16/2012) - Young patients with some types of advanced cancer, for whom standard treatment had failed, had their tumors disappear during treatment with a drug that both targets and blocks a protein associated with their disease. These findings are from a Phase I, multicenter trial, led by investigators from the Children's Oncology Group (COG), and supported by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health.

(Posted: 05/07/2012) - Two new studies have found that large structural abnormalities in chromosomes, some of which have been associated with increased risk of cancer, can be detected in a small fraction of people without a prior history of cancer. The studies found that these alterations in chromosomes appear to increase with age, particularly after the age of 50, and may be associated with an increased risk for cancer. Mosaicism, the type of structural abnormality in chromosomes that is described in these studies, results from a DNA alteration that is present in some of the body's cells but not in others. A person with mosaicism has a mixture of normal and mutated cells.

(Posted: 03/31/2012) - Preliminary results from clinical trials in a subtype of lymphoma show that for a number of patients whose disease was not cured by other treatments, the drug ibrutinib can provide significant anti-cancer responses with modest side effects.