Tumors

Cellphone users may be at increased risk for two types of rare tumors and should try to reduce their exposure to the energy emitted by the phones, according to a panel of 31 international scientists convened by an agency within the World Health Organization. Studies so far do not show definitively that cellphone use increases that risk, said the authors of the consensus statement issued Tuesday by the WHO. But "limited" scientific evidence exists, they said, to suggest that the radiofrequency energy released by cellphones may increase the risk of glioma, a type of brain cancer, and acoustic neuroma, a noncancerous tumor of the nerve that runs from the ear to the brain.

Mary Tyler Moore, the actress best remembered for her roles on "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "Mary Tyler Moore," will have surgery to remove a benign brain tumor called a meningioma, her publicist said Thursday. Moore's physicians have been monitoring the tumor for several years; it is not life-threatening and the iconic actress is expected to make a full recovery after the surgery at an undisclosed hospital. Here's everything you might ever want to know about menigiomas. Meningiomas, which account for a little over a quarter of all brain tumors, grow out of the meninges, the membranes that surround the brain and spinal cord.

Cancer cells are riddled with genetic errors, and each tumor has its own unique set of mistakes. Reading those errors, scientists believe, will help them not only understand how a tumor came to be, but also how best to poison it. "Every tumor is telling its own story, its own history," says Kevin White, director of the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology at the University of Chicago. One by one, he's reading and analyzing those stories as part of the university's $5-million Chicago Cancer Genome Project.

Two drugs used against kidney cancer won the endorsement of a federal advisory panel Tuesday to treat a form of pancreatic cancer that strikes several hundred Americans each year. The panel found that the benefits of Novartis Pharmaceuticals' Afinitor and Pfizer's Sutent outweighed their toxic side effects, increasing the likelihood that the Food and Drug Administration would approve their use for pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors. The drugs provide significant new treatment options with the potential to extend the lives of patients diagnosed with the tumors.

Cancer treatments, such as radiation and chemotherapy, are more shotgun-scattered than precision-targeted. They damage bystanding healthy cells as they attack the tumor tissue, causing nasty side effects. Scientists would like to focus these therapies more narrowly on the cancer cells alone, and researchers in Toronto have come up with a new strategy. With a flick of a genetic switch, they've made cancer cells ultra-sensitive to radiation, thus killing tumors that normally withstand the treatment.

Boston researchers have sequenced the genomes of prostate tumors from seven men, a "landmark event" that promises eventually to help clinicians learn how to differentiate between those tumors that will be highly aggressive and require immediate treatment and those that are essentially benign  and that can be simply observed. "This is a transforming moment in understanding the underlying biology of prostate cancer," said geneticist Michael F. Berger of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, lead author of the paper appearing online Wednesday in the journal Nature . Geneticists have been sequencing a variety of tumors of different types, but the effort on prostate tumors introduces a new level of complexity.

In 1984, when he was 51, novelist Reynolds Price learned that a pencil-shaped tumor, about 10 inches long and malignant, had invaded his spine. Several surgeries and dozens of radiation treatments followed, leaving him a paraplegic racked with pain and the uncertainty of his survival. His happy life of teaching Milton at Duke University and writing several hours a day was over, or so it seemed in his many dark moments. Then, after a year of this agony, something miraculous happened: He knocked out a commissioned play in two months and finished the last two-thirds of his seventh novel, "Kate Vaiden," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award as the best work of fiction in 1986.

Prostate cancer is often discovered when the tumor is localized -- meaning it has not spread beyond the site of the original cancer. Still, men with localized prostate cancer are given a "stage" of T1 or T2 to reflect the size of the tumor and other characteristics that involve the chances that the cancer will recur. Cancer staging can also help doctors and patients decide on treatments after surgery. However, a new study confirms what many cancer doctors have felt about localized prostate cancer staging: It just doesn't appear to matter after surgery.

Scientists are turning up the heat on cancer with a one-two punch of radiation plus fever temperatures that could shrink stubborn tumors. Drugs and radiation can beat back tumors, but some cancer cells usually survive the assault. So researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston fortified their arsenal with gold-covered nanoparticles that embed themselves in tumors and bake them to temperatures of 108 degrees when activated with an infrared laser. In their experiments, treating mice with heat plus standard radiation cleared breast cancer tumors better than either therapy alone.

Advanced CT imaging can reduce deaths from lung cancer by 20% among heavy smokers by detecting tumors at an earlier stage when they are more treatable, according to results released Thursday from the first study to compare the value of CT scans and regular chest X-rays for lung cancer screening. The long-awaited results of the trial involving more than 53,000 former and current heavy smokers were so conclusive that the study was terminated ahead of schedule last week and letters were sent to all the participants advising them of the results.