Download or read book Is Cancer Inevitable written by Ashani T. Weeraratna and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can new understandings about cancer cell interactions help doctors better control, and eventually cure, cancer? Cancer is a formidable enemy. In fact, people born in America since 1960 face a one in two chance of being diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes. However, there's growing evidence that fewer cancers will be death sentences for patients. New approaches and understandings are transforming the medical world, increasing success rates for remissions, disease management, and cures. Dr. Ashani Weeraratna is at the forefront of this new level of care. In Is Cancer Inevitable?, Weeraratna—a pioneering melanoma researcher whose work explores the role aging plays in cancer cells' spread and drug resistance—gives readers an inside look at several of the latest cancer advances. Detailing the actions that are reducing the disease's impact and exploring what the future may hold, she explains how the molecular mechanisms involved in metastasis and the cells' microenvironments influence cancer's development and progression. Over the years, she writes, our understanding of how cancer cells move throughout the body, change as they plant themselves in the body's microenvironments, and even communicate with one another have led to major insights about how cancer works. With compelling detail, she takes us inside her lab, revealing how new insights are leading to major breakthroughs, even among patients with Stage IV cancer. She also explains how age-related changes in the microenvironment contribute to multiple aspects of melanoma formation and development. Such scholarship, she argues, is moving us toward a day when more patients will be declared cancer-free. An inspiring and deeply personal book, Is Cancer Inevitable? offers readers newfound hope. Features • Explores key insights and studies developed in recent years that have greatly influenced the world of cancer research, including how aging microenvironments within our bodies encourage metastasis and therapy resistance • Guides readers through Dr. Ashani Weeraratna's personal story of coming to the United States from Lesotho at the age of 17 and rising to become one of the pioneers in her field • Brings readers inside Weeraratna's lab, describing both the processes and the missions of her work • Raises awareness about how cancer works within the body and what any patient or family encountering the disease needs to understand—while also offering them hope based on new and forthcoming diagnostic and treatment methods • Outlines why we will never control—let alone cure—cancer if we don't find a common purpose and come together in collaboration, inviting the greatest minds from around the world to participate in finding and implementing solutions Johns Hopkins Wavelengths In classrooms, field stations, and laboratories in Baltimore and around the world, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professors of Johns Hopkins University are opening the boundaries of our understanding of many of the world's most complex challenges. The Johns Hopkins Wavelengths book series brings readers inside their stories, illustrating how their pioneering discoveries benefit people in their neighborhoods and across the globe in artificial intelligence, cancer research, food systems' environmental impacts, health equity, science diplomacy, and other critical arenas of study. Through these compelling narratives, their insights will spark conversations from dorm rooms to dining rooms to boardrooms.
Download or read book Molecular Biology of The Cell written by Bruce Alberts and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Living with Hereditary Cancer Risk written by Kathy Steligo and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2022-09-27 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book provides a comprehensive overview of hereditary cancer for a general audience, with coverage of the genetic tests available for detecting risk for heritable cancers as well as options for medical and surgical treatment"--
Download or read book The Cancer Chronicles written by George Johnson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the woman he loved was diagnosed with a metastatic cancer, science writer George Johnson embarked on a journey to learn everything he could about the disease and the people who dedicate their lives to understanding and combating it. What he discovered is a revolution under way—an explosion of new ideas about what cancer really is and where it comes from. In a provocative and intellectually vibrant exploration, he takes us on an adventure through the history and recent advances of cancer research that will challenge everything you thought you knew about the disease. Deftly excavating and illuminating decades of investigation and analysis, he reveals what we know and don’t know about cancer, showing why a cure remains such a slippery concept. We follow him as he combs through the realms of epidemiology, clinical trials, laboratory experiments, and scientific hypotheses—rooted in every discipline from evolutionary biology to game theory and physics. Cogently extracting fact from a towering canon of myth and hype, he describes tumors that evolve like alien creatures inside the body, paleo-oncologists who uncover petrified tumors clinging to the skeletons of dinosaurs and ancient human ancestors, and the surprising reversals in science’s comprehension of the causes of cancer, with the foods we eat and environmental toxins playing a lesser role. Perhaps most fascinating of all is how cancer borrows natural processes involved in the healing of a wound or the unfolding of a human embryo and turns them, jujitsu-like, against the body. Throughout his pursuit, Johnson clarifies the human experience of cancer with elegiac grace, bearing witness to the punishing gauntlet of consultations, surgeries, targeted therapies, and other treatments. He finds compassion, solace, and community among a vast network of patients and professionals committed to the fight and wrestles to comprehend the cruel randomness cancer metes out in his own family. For anyone whose life has been affected by cancer and has found themselves asking why?, this book provides a new understanding. In good company with the works of Atul Gawande, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Abraham Verghese, The Cancer Chronicles is endlessly surprising and as radiant in its prose as it is authoritative in its eye-opening science.
Download or read book Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk written by Suzanne H. Reuben and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2010-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though overall cancer incidence and mortality have continued to decline in recent years, cancer continues to devastate the lives of far too many Americans. In 2009 alone, 1.5 million American men, women, and children were diagnosed with cancer, and 562,000 died from the disease. There is a growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer. The Pres. Cancer Panel dedicated its 2008¿2009 activities to examining the impact of environmental factors on cancer risk. The Panel considered industrial, occupational, and agricultural exposures as well as exposures related to medical practice, military activities, modern lifestyles, and natural sources. This report presents the Panel¿s recommend. to mitigate or eliminate these barriers. Illus.
Download or read book Oxford Textbook of Cancer Biology written by Francesco Pezzella and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of the biology of tumours has grown to become markedly interdisciplinary, involving chemists, statisticians, epidemiologists, mathematicians, bioinformaticians, and computer scientists alongside biologists, geneticists, and clinicians. The Oxford Textbook of Cancer Biology brings together the most up-to-date developments from different branches of research into one coherent volume, providing a comprehensive and current account of this rapidly evolving field. Structured in eight sections, the book starts with a review of the development and biology of multi-cellular organisms, how they maintain a healthy homeostasis in an individual, and a description of the molecular basis of cancer development. The book then illustrates, as once cells become neoplastic, their signalling network is altered and pathological behaviour follows. It explores the changes that cancer cells can induce in nearby normal tissue, the new relationship established between them and the stroma, and the interaction between the immune system and tumour growth. The authors illustrate the contribution provided by high throughput techniques to map cancer at different levels, from genomic sequencing to cellular metabolic functions, and how information technology, with its vast amounts of data, is integrated with traditional cell biology to provide a global view of the disease. The effect of the different types of treatments on the biology of the neoplastic cells are explored to understand on the one side, why some treatments succeed, and on the other, how they can affect the biology of resistant and recurrent disease. The book concludes by summarizing what we know to date about cancer, and in what direction our understanding of cancer is moving. Edited by leading authorities in the field with an international team of contributors, this book is an essential resource for scholars and professionals working in the wide variety of sub-disciplines that make up today's cancer research and treatment community. It is written not only for consultation, but also for easy cover-to-cover reading.
Download or read book The Emperor of All Maladies written by Siddhartha Mukherjee and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-08-09 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is “an extraordinary achievement” (The New Yorker)—a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.
Download or read book The Cheating Cell written by Athena Aktipis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fundamental and groundbreaking reassessment of how we view and manage cancer When we think of the forces driving cancer, we don’t necessarily think of evolution. But evolution and cancer are closely linked because the historical processes that created life also created cancer. The Cheating Cell delves into this extraordinary relationship, and shows that by understanding cancer’s evolutionary origins, researchers can come up with more effective, revolutionary treatments. Athena Aktipis goes back billions of years to explore when unicellular forms became multicellular organisms. Within these bodies of cooperating cells, cheating ones arose, overusing resources and replicating out of control, giving rise to cancer. Aktipis illustrates how evolution has paved the way for cancer’s ubiquity, and why it will exist as long as multicellular life does. Even so, she argues, this doesn’t mean we should give up on treating cancer—in fact, evolutionary approaches offer new and promising options for the disease’s prevention and treatments that aim at long-term management rather than simple eradication. Looking across species—from sponges and cacti to dogs and elephants—we are discovering new mechanisms of tumor suppression and the many ways that multicellular life-forms have evolved to keep cancer under control. By accepting that cancer is a part of our biological past, present, and future—and that we cannot win a war against evolution—treatments can become smarter, more strategic, and more humane. Unifying the latest research from biology, ecology, medicine, and social science, The Cheating Cell challenges us to rethink cancer’s fundamental nature and our relationship to it.
Download or read book Avoiding Cancer One Day at a Time written by Lynne Eldridge and published by Avoiding Cancer Now. This book was released on 2006-12 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mortality rate from cancer hasn't changed in 60 years despite the billions invested to find a cure. Avoiding Cancer One Day At A Time provides solid, practical advice for preventing cancer by avoiding carcinogens and implementing lifestyle/dietary practices that modify cancer causing factors. Combining their experience in family medicine and epidemiology with their passion for disease prevention, the authors provide the most up to date and effective advice for preventing cancer from developing in ourselves and our loved ones. Many ?how to? examples for preventing cancer by being environmentally aware, avoiding infections, living the proper lifestyle and getting the proper nutrition are provided. Chapter by chapter summaries and listings of the latest cancer prevention web sites are great references. Worksheets assist readers in implementing the advice in very tangible ways, and the recipe collection of cancer avoiding meals is a winner!
Download or read book Confronting Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer written by Sue Friedman and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Be informed. Be empowered. Be well." If you are concerned that the cancer in your family is hereditary, you face difficult choices. Should you have a blood test that may reveal whether you have a high likelihood of disease? Do you preemptively treat a disease that may never develop? How do you make decisions now that will affect the rest of your life? This helpful, informative guide answers your questions as you confront hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. Developed by Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered (FORCE), the nation’s only nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting families affected by hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, this book stands alone among breast and ovarian cancer resources. Equal parts health guide and memoir, it defines complex issues facing previvors and survivors and provides solutions with a fresh, authoritative voice. Written by three passionate advocates for the hereditary cancer community who are themselves breast cancer survivors, Confronting Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer dispels myths and misinformation and presents practical risk-reducing alternatives and decision-making tools. Including information about genetic counseling and testing, preventive surgery, and fertility and family planning, as well as explanations of health insurance coverage and laws protecting genetic privacy, this resource tackles head-on the challenges of living in a high-risk body. Confronting hereditary cancer is a complex, confusing, and highly individual journey. With its unique combination of the latest research, expert advice, and compelling personal stories, this book gives previvors, survivors, and their family members the guidance they need to face the unique challenges of hereditary cancer.
Download or read book Malignant Metaphor written by Alanna Mitchell and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Clear medical explanations . . . will bring comfort to those readers and their loved ones facing a cancer diagnosis” (Publishers Weekly). A Finalist for the Lane Anderson Award for Science Writing Alanna Mitchell explores the facts and myths about cancer in this powerful book, as she recounts her family’s experiences with the disease. When her beloved brother-in-law John is diagnosed with malignant melanoma, Alanna throws herself into the latest clinical research, providing us with a clear description of what scientists know of cancer and its treatments. When John enters the world of alternative treatments, Alanna does, too, looking for the science in untested waters. She comes face to face with the misconceptions we share about cancer, which are rooted in blame and anxiety, and opens the door to new ways of looking at our most-feared illness. Beautifully written, Malignant Metaphor is a compassionate and persuasive book that has the power to change the conversation about cancer. “Mitchell’s research is rooted in science, while her writing remains grippingly personal.” ―Quill & Quire
Download or read book Cancer disease of civilization written by Vilhjalmur Stefansson and published by David De Angelis. This book was released on 2020-12-24 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vilhjalmur Stefansson has had the extraordinary privilege and the rare merit to know intimately certain segments of the world which will always be strange to most of us. He has had the alertness to note details, to make correlations which would have escaped others. He has been unhampered by professional or even by lay prejudices. And he has a gift for expressing the ideas which his observations have evoked. The story which he presents in this book is a fascinating one. Here is the sort of thing we call basic research, just as much so as if it were being conducted in the latest of laboratories. Here are the data from a series of experiments which Nature has performed for us—in the Arctic northland, in the tropic forests of Gabon, and in the temperate valley of Hunzaland. She has varied a series of environmental factors yet come up with a like result in the three places, and a result which she has produced, so far as we know, only in those three special combinations of environments, not in any other of her myriads of combinations elsewhere. What have these three in common, that they produce this result, so important to us? Nature will not repeat those experiments. And we will not have another Stefansson to read the data and present them to us. I hope, therefore, that what he has to say will be read carefully and pondered deeply.
Download or read book Malignant written by S. Lochlann Jain and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Cancer can kill: this fact makes it concrete. Still, it's a devious knave. Nearly every American will experience it up-close and all too personally, wondering why the billions of research dollars thrown at the word haven't exterminated it from the English language. Like a sapper diffusing a bomb, Jain unscrambles the emotional, bureaucratic, medical, and scientific tropes that create the thing we call cancer. Scientists debate even the most basic facts about the disease, while endlessly generated, disputed, population data produce the appearance of knowledge. Jain takes the vacuum at the center of cancer seriously and demonstrates the need to understand cancer as a set of relationships--economic, sentimental, medical, personal, ethical, institutional, statistical. Malignant analyzes the peculiar authority of the socio-sexual psychopathologies of body parts; the uneven effects of expertise and power; the potentially cancerous consequences of medical procedures such as IVF; the huge industrial investments that manifest themselves as bone-cold testing rooms; the legal mess of medical malpractice law; and the teeth-grittingly jovial efforts to smear makeup and wigs over the whole messy problem of bodies spiraling into pain and decay. Malignant examines the painful cognitive dissonances produced by the ways a culture that has relished dazzling success in every conceivable arena have twisted one of its staunchest failures into an economic triumph. The intractable foil to American achievement, cancer hands us -- on a silver platter and ready for Jain's incisively original dissection -- our sacrifice to the American Dream"--
Download or read book Facing Cancer and the Fear of Death written by Norman Straker and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Facing Cancer and the Fear of Death: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Treatment, Dr. Norman Straker proposes that "death anxiety" is responsible for the American society's failure to address costly futile care at the end of life; more specifically, doctors default on the appropriate prescription of palliative care because of this anxiety. This leads to unnecessary suffering for terminally-ill patients and their families and significant distress for physicians. To address these challenges in the culture of medical education, increased psychological support for physicians who treat dying patients is necessary. Additionally, physicians need to reach a consensus regarding the discontinuation of active treatments. Psychoanalysts have traditionally denied the importance of death anxiety and report relatively few treatment cases of dying patients in their literature. This book offers multiple treatment reports by psychoanalysts that illustrate the effectiveness and value of a flexible approach to patients facing death. The psychoanalytic reader is expected to gain a greater level of comfort with facing death and is encouraged to consider making themselves more available to the ever-increasing population of cancer survivors. Further, psychoanalysts are encouraged to be more useful partners to the oncologists that are burdened by the irrational feelings of all parties.
Download or read book Pancreatic Cancer written by Michael J. Lippe and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-06-15 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael J. Lippe was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007. This is his story, and the story of pancreatic cancer, narrated by Lippe and Dr. Dung T. Le, the physician who is treating him. In telling these stories, Lippe and Le alternate chapters. Lippe writes about the early signs that something was wrong; Le continues with a description of pancreatic cancer, its symptoms, and its treatments. Lippe talks about his prognosis, contemplates the prospect of death, and describes how he began to cope; Le explains the importance, for both doctor and patient, of balancing hope and truth. Lippe speaks frankly about the toll the disease takes on his marriage and family; Le offers a general picture of what most patients can expect with their illness. The book concludes with Lippe and Le’s reflections on their partnership in treating cancer, lessons they have learned, and their thoughts about the positive things that sometimes emerge from illness. Pancreatic Cancer offers clear explanations of what the disease is, describes what people with the disease will feel physically and mentally, and discusses current treatments and future directions of research. The authors hope that their honest yet hopeful perspective will help all people with cancer and those who care about them.
Download or read book The Cancer Crisis in Appalachia written by Nathan L. Vanderford and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kentucky has more cancer diagnoses and cancer-related deaths than any other state in the nation, and most of these cases are concentrated in the fifty-four counties that constitute the Appalachian region of the commonwealth. These high rankings can be attributed to factors such as elevated smoking rates, unhealthy eating habits, lower levels of education, and limited access to health care. What is lost in the statistics is just how life-changing cancer can be—something that editors Nathan L. Vanderford, Lauren Hudson, and Chris Prichard have endeavored to address. The Cancer Crisis in Appalachia features essays written by a group of twenty high school and five undergraduate students, all of whom are residents of Kentucky's Appalachian region and are participants in the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center's Appalachian Career Training in Oncology (ACTION) program, which is funded by the National Cancer Institute's Youth Enjoy Science Program. These authentic and candid student essays detail the effects of cancer diagnoses and deaths on individuals, families, friends, and communities, and proclaim these cases as more than nameless statistics. The authors shed light on personal cancer stories in hopes of inspiring readers to avoid cancer-risk behaviors, get involved with cancer-prevention initiatives, give generously, and uplift cancer patients and their loved ones.
Download or read book Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England written by Alanna Skuse and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-11-11 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is open access under a CC-BY licence. Cancer is perhaps the modern world's most feared disease. Yet, we know relatively little about this malady's history before the nineteenth century. This book provides the first in-depth examination of perceptions of cancerous disease in early modern England. Looking to drama, poetry and polemic as well as medical texts and personal accounts, it contends that early modern people possessed an understanding of cancer which remains recognizable to us today. Many of the ways in which medical practitioners and lay people imagined cancer – as a 'woman's disease' or a 'beast' inside the body – remain strikingly familiar, and they helped to make this disease a byword for treachery and cruelty in discussions of religion, culture and politics. Equally, cancer treatments were among the era's most radical medical and surgical procedures. From buttered frog ointments to agonizing and dangerous surgeries, they raised abiding questions about the nature of disease and the proper role of the medical practitioner.
