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Melissa Etheridge Calls Angelina Jolie's Mastectomy a 'Fearful Choice'

By Melissa Etheridge. Published Tuesday, June 18, 2013.

Wow. Yikes. Okey dokey. Well. Yes. When asked about Angelina Jolie's decision to undergo a preventive double mastectomy, Melissa Etheridge, who also carries the BRCA gene (and got breast cancer from it) says she definitely wouldn't call it a "brave choice." Because people should really think about granola bars and squeezy stress balls first or something.

I wouldn’t call it the brave choice," Etheridge, 52, says. "I actually think it's the most fearful choice you can make when confronting anything with cancer. My belief is that cancer comes from inside you and so much of it has to do with the environment of your body. It's the stress that will turn that gene on or not."

Instead, Etheridge says a preventative mastectomy should be something a person considers after examining all of her options.

"Plenty of people have the gene mutation and everything but it never comes to cancer," she says. "I would say to anybody faced with that, that choice is way down the line on the spectrum of what you can do and to really consider the advancements we've made in things like nutrition and stress levels."

Low-Risk Prostate Cancer, Observation Is Safe.

By Julia H. Hayes, M. D. Published Tuesday, June 18, 2013.

"Watchful waiting" is safe, cost-effective, and results in a better quality of life for patients with low-risk, localized prostate cancer, rather than undergoing immediate treatment, says a study carried out at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The study findings were published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

According to the authors, their statistical models demonstrated that for 70% of men with low-risk prostate cancer at diagnosis "observation is a reasonable and, in some situations, cost-saving alternative to initial treatment."

Julia Hayes, MD, and team believe that their findings confirm that active surveillance and watchful waiting, often referred to as observation, is a reasonable option with low-risk prostate cancer - an option that is underused.

This is a huge number of patients with low-risk prostate cancer who either receive some form of radiation

therapy or undergo a radical prostatectomy (their prostate gland is surgically removed), and face the pain and discomfort of treatment, plus the risk of urinary incontinence and erectile dysfunction.

Localized Prostate Cancer - Removal No Better Than Observation - the (low) risk of death over a 12-year period for newly diagnosed patients with low-risk prostate cancer who underwent a radical prostatectomy is the same as for those who opted for observation, according to a clinical trial called PIVOT, which will be  published online on 19 July in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Growth Of Breast Cancer Cells Halted By Osteoporosis Drug, Even In Resistant Tumors.

By Duke University Medical Center. Published Tuesday, June 18, 2013.

A drug approved in Europe to treat osteoporosis has now been shown to stop the growth of breast cancer cells, even in cancers that have become resistant to current targeted therapies, according to a Duke Cancer Institute study.

The findings, presented at the annual Endocrine Society meeting in San Francisco, indicate that the drug bazedoxifene packs a powerful one-two punch that not only prevents estrogen from fueling breast cancer cell growth, but also flags the estrogen receptor for destruction.

"We found bazedoxifene binds to the estrogen receptor and interferes with its activity, but the surprising thing we then found was that it also degrades the receptor; it gets rid of it," said senior author Donald McDonnell, PhD, chair of Duke's Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology.

In animal and cell culture studies, the drug inhibited growth both in estrogen-dependent breast cancer cells and  in cells that had developed resistance to the anti-estrogen tamoxifen and/or to the aromatase inhibitors, two of  the most widely used types of drugs to prevent and treat estrogen-dependent breast cancer. Currently, if breast cancer cells develop resistance to these therapies, patients are usually treated with toxic chemotherapy agents that have significant side effects.

Bazedoxifene is a pill that, like tamoxifen, belongs to a class of drugs known as specific estrogen receptor modulators (SERMs). These drugs are distinguished by their ability to behave like estrogen in some tissues, while significantly blocking estrogen action in other tissues. But unlike tamoxifen, bazedoxifene has some of the properties of a newer group of drugs, known as selective estrogen receptor degraders, or SERDs, which can target the estrogen receptor for destruction.

"Because the drug is removing the estrogen receptor as a target by degradation, it is less likely the cancer cell can develop a resistance mechanism because you are removing the target," said lead author Suzanne Wardell, PhD, a research scientist working in McDonnell's lab.

Many investigators had assumed that once breast cancer cells developed resistance to tamoxifen, they would be resistant to all drugs that target the estrogen receptor, McDonnell explained.

"We discovered that the estrogen receptor is still a good target, even after it resistance to tamoxifen has developed," he said.

Hairdresser Who Shaved Head To Support Cancer-Suffering Sister Quits Job After Salon Ask Her To Wear Wig.

By inquisitr.com. Published Tuesday, June 18, 2013.

A hairdresser who shaved her head to support her sister, who is battling ovarian cancer, was forced to resign because her employers insisted that she needed to wear a wig.

Melanie Strandberg who has worked in Spokane, Washington, since December in her role as a salon supervisor and hair stylist, but her bosses believed that her bald head would make customers incredibly uncomfortable.

However Strandberg was apoplectic at the request, and instead she resigned. Strandberg stated about the ordeal, “I decided that I can’t just support her 50 percent of the time.”

Strandberg was talking about her sister, Marisa Lowe, who recently discovered that she has been diagnosed with cancer for the second time her life. Lowe only found out two weeks ago that she has stage-three ovarian cancer, after she’d had a first round of chemo last year.

Strandberg herself has also overcome her own cancer battle, and once she knew that her sister was again struggling with the illness she knew that she wanted to support her.

Once the owners at La Rive Salon and Spa asked her to wear a wig, Strandberg decided to write a resignation letter which she went on to upload to Facebook.

She wrote, “I was told I could possibly offend guests and would not be able to market hair sales without hair. I believe none of this to be just not true in the least bit. I feel I would inspire and do our community proud in showing my support … I can only hope that someone fighting cancer never gets told they may offend someone due to their appearance.”

A spokesperson for the general hair salon company has stated that they are going to investigate Strandberg’s claims as they clash with their policy. They have even noted that she can have her job back if she wants it.

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