Cancer

When I think of actress Lupe Ontiveros, who passed away from liver cancer at 69 Thursday night, what stays with me most is her strength. Her women tended to be strong and resilient, no-nonsense types, whether they were running a theater company as she did in "Chuck & Buck," dealing with a rebellious daughter in "Real Women Have Curves," or picking up after some well-heeled white family, as she did in"The Goonies. "There was a "I have seen it all" quality that danced in her eyes, more bemused by the frailties of the human race than bitter about them.

By opting for surgery to remove her breasts while they were still healthy, Angelina Jolie joined a growing number of women who have used genetic testing to take control of their health. Here are answers to some common questions about how DNA influences breast cancer risk and what women can do about it. What genes are involved in breast cancer? The two primary ones are known as BRCA1 and BRCA2. Hundreds of variants of these genes have been found that make a woman - or a man - more likely to develop breast cancer.

Phil Jackson never liked to compare Kobe Bryant to Michael Jordan. Believe me, I tried everything. Sometimes I'd ask him after random Lakers practices or before games against Charlotte, the team Jordan owned. Or after games in Chicago, where nostalgia hopefully would add to the mix. There would be a little nugget here, a tiny nibble there, but nothing that mattered. It's coming out now, though, in Jackson's 339-page memoir co-written with Hugh Delehanty and available Tuesday: "Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success.

The links between sleep and cancer are now so many, you could build a chain. A new study has found that for men who suffer insomnia and unwelcome wakefulness, the risk of prostate cancer is greater than for those whose sleep is undisrupted. That research expands on a growing body of evidence that men and women whose sleep is short, broken or of poor quality are at higher risk of developing a wide range of cancers. Research has long linked overnight shift work -- and the circadian rhythm disruptions that are common with it -- as a risk factor for breast cancer and endometrial cancers in women.

Vietnam veteran John Otte did his best to forget the war. He got married, raised two sons and made a career working at credit unions. But as Otte neared retirement, memories of combat flooded back. Starting in 2005, he filed a series of claims with Veterans Affairs for disability compensation, contending that many of his health problems stemmed from the war. The VA agreed, and now the 65-year-old with two Purple Hearts receives $1,900 a month for post-traumatic stress disorder and diabetes - and for having shrapnel scars on his arms.

"The Dog Whisperer" Cesar Millan is usually focused on rehabbing canines -- but he's now revealing some work he had to do on himself following a suicide attempt in 2010. In February of that year, he lost his top dog, Daddy, to cancer after 16 years as a team. A month later, Millan's wife told him she wanted a divorce after 16 years of marriage. The combined blow knocked him for a loop, he shares in "Cesar Millan: The Real Story," a documentary on Nat Geo Wild. In May 2010, he attempted suicide via drug overdose, winding up unconscious and hospitalized, he said.

He had just made the final out in a city where his name is booed, his jersey is reviled, and his team had been swept. His power had disappeared, his swing was spotty, and his season was a wreck. Matt Kemp would have been excused for quickly disappearing through the dugout at San Francisco's AT&T Park on Sunday night and forgetting all about an earlier promise to third base coach Tim Wallach. “But that was the neat deal about it,” Wallach said. “He was standing there waiting for me.” PHOTOS: Greatest moments in Dodger Stadium history Kemp was waiting to cross the diamond to sign an autograph for a terminally ill Dodgers fan, waiting to summon the passion necessary to pass along the hope that he now found so precious.

A San Fernando Valley doctor and evangelical minister who federal prosecutors said used bogus herbal medications to offer false hope to dozens of people suffering from diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's was found guilty Tuesday of nearly a dozen federal charges. Twenty-eight victims or family members of victims who died while taking the products testified against Christine Daniel, 57, who was found guilty Tuesday on four counts of mail and wire fraud, six counts of tax evasion related to income tax filings as well as one count of witness tampering.

When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan's colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn't feel like having visitors, and she said so. Her colleague's response? "This isn't just about you. " "It's not?" Susan wondered. "My breast cancer is not about me? It's about you?" The same theme came up again when our friend Katie had a brain aneurysm. She was in intensive care for a long time and finally got out and into a step-down unit.

Whether perusing the beauty and personal care products at Target or Whole Foods or shopping online at Sephora, consumers are increasingly encountering the phrase "paraben-free. " What exactly does paraben-free mean, and why might it matter? We take a closer look — including sussing out pretty makeup products that are paraben-free. What are parabens? Parabens are the most widely used preservatives in cosmetics and personal care products such as soap, moisturizers, shaving cream and underarm deodorant, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

Pale and emaciated, Michael Jackson lay on his bed in his $100,000-a-month Holmby Hills mansion looking like an end-stage cancer patient who had come home to die. The scene inside the house where Jackson lived as he prepared for a comeback tour was described Tuesday in stark detail by Richard Senneff, the lead-off witness in a wrongful-death case brought by the pop legend's mother and three children against entertainment firm AEG. FOR THE...

For Dr. Antronette K. Yancey, a UCLA public health professor, exercise could be fun and done in short bursts in the workplace, schools and even places of worship. Her campaign to urge people to incorporate physical activity into their daily lives led to a 2010 book about the topic - "Instant Recess: Building a Fit Nation 10 Minutes at a Time. " Long before First Lady Michelle Obama launched a national conversation on physical fitness, Yancey was talking about the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle and the benefits of exercise, colleagues said.

It stands to reason that the longer a woman waits to start breast cancer treatment, the worse her prognosis. A new study of California women puts some hard numbers on the cost of delaying treatment - and finds that Latinas, African Americans and poor women were most likely to put their recovery at risk by waiting six weeks or more to have surgery or begin chemotherapy. Researchers from UC Irvine and Children's Hospital of Orange County focused on breast cancer patients between the ages of 15 and 39. Women in this age group account for only 5% to 6% of all breast cancer patients, but their cancers are typically more aggressive, and the urgency to begin treatment is higher.

Way back in 2002, Dr. Judah Folkman hit upon a tantalizing weight-loss strategy for obese mice. When given daily injections of a drug designed to fight cancer, their fat melted away. The higer the dose they got, the more fat they lost. Some of the obese mice shed so much weight that they wound up at “near normal body weights,” Folkman and his colleagues reported in this article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Whatever happened to this promising fat-busting drug?

Hilary Koprowski, a Polish-born researcher who developed the first successful oral vaccine for polio, has died. He was 96. Koprowski died of pneumonia April 11 at his Philadelphia home, said his son, Dr. Christopher Koprowski, a radiation oncologist. In 1950, Hilary Koprowski showed that it was possible to use his live-virus oral vaccine against polio, which had plagued the United States and other countries for decades. Another researcher, Dr. Albert Sabin, would win the race to get an oral vaccine licensed in the U.S. while Jonas Salk would develop an injectable vaccine that eliminated much of the disease in the country.

Bobby Heravi did not want his son, Faryan, to hear the doctor's verdict and so made sure the boy's head was turned away when he asked about his son's chances of surviving an aggressive form of lymphoma. "With my mouth expression I said, 'What percent?' And the doctor just did this," Heravi said, splaying three fingers. "Because he was diagnosed as Stage 4. Stage 4 means terminal. " The family, which lives in Irvine, was at its lowest ebb last May when Faryan, a Ducks fan who played street hockey through the club's SCORE sports and educational program, was visited in the hospital by future Hall of Famer Teemu Selanne.

One afternoon last fall at Warner Bros. studios, Jessica Queller found herself acting more like a middle-aged woman than the youthful TV writer that she is. While tossing out lines for the headmistress, a new character on "Gossip Girl," the popular teenage soap opera she works on, Queller began formalizing her diction and sitting erect as a chalkboard to channel the drab disciplinarian. So what did her colleagues do? As a joke, they named the character "Headmistress Queller." "I found out when I saw it on TV," Queller said recently over lunch, smiling as she recalled the moment that made her very cool with her little cousins.

Having been born to one of the most famous couples of this century--America's greatest modern writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his talented flapper wife Zelda Sayre--Scottie Fitzgerald was thrust a heavy mantle, particularly as their only child. Add to that the heady cocktail of parental alcoholism, prescription drug abuse, numerous failed suicide attempts and schizophrenia. Talent and tragedy were genetically passed on to Scottie as surely as her blond hair and blue eyes. Until now, very little was known about the Fitzgeralds' daughter beyond her school days.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court took up a deceptively simple question in a case brought by breast cancer patients and medical researchers: Are human genes patentable? The answer appeared to be "no" during Monday's oral arguments. The justices signaled that they probably will bar any grants of exclusive and profitable patents on human genes that prevent other scientists from testing these pieces of DNA. But the justices were aware the issue itself was anything but simple, and they sounded wary of going too far and taking away the financial incentives for companies and their scientists to explore new uses for DNA. "The patent law is filled with uneasy compromises," Justice Stephen G. Breyer said.

Dave Alvin and a slew of other veterans of the Southern California blues and roots music communities, including Junior Watson, James Harman and the Mike Eldred Trio, will gather Sunday at Café Fais Do Do in Los Angeles to salute harmonica ace John “Juke” Logan in a benefit for the American Institute for Cancer Research. Logan has been contending with esophageal cancer on and off since 2009, and proceeds from the show will be targeted toward research on that strain of cancer.