Tag: cancer prevention

Rally for Medical Research: Help Protect Funding for Medical Research

On April 8, 2012 thousands of individuals and nearly 200 partnering programs, including representatives from the American Society of Hematology (ASH), American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), and American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) gathered at the Carnegie Library grounds in Washington, D.C. for the Rally for Medical Research. Here medical research supporters sought to raise public awareness over the importance of federally funded medical research. This need has been magnified by the March 1 sequestration mandated cuts to all areas of the federal budget, and a decade long decline in funding for the National Institute of Health (NIH).

As ASH wrote, this decline in money for medical research is not a new development:

“Research supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is in serious jeopardy. NIH’s inflation-adjusted budget today is almost 20 percent lower than it was in FY 2003…Under sequestration, the NIH budget will be cut by an additional $1.6 billion over the remainder of fiscal year (FY) 2013. While the impact of these cuts may not be felt all at once or immediately, the harm caused to bio-medical research will be devastating- progress toward cures for deadly diseases and efforts to prevent costly chronic conditions will be slowed…”

Besides these  budgetary concerns, ASCO President Sandra M. Swain noted the human cost of such budget cuts, stressing the impressive strides made in cancer research due to federal funding:

“As a direct result of the federal investment in cancer research, we understand more about cancers than at any point in human history. This understanding of cancer at the molecular level has created unprecedented opportunities to slow the growth of cancer diseases. As a country, we can be proud that two of three people in the U.S. with cancer live at least 5 years after their diagnosis. This is up from one of two in the 1970s before the passage of the National Cancer Act. Since the 1990s, the nation’s cancer death rate has dropped 18 percent, reversing decades of increases. More than 13 million people in the U.S. are cancer survivors.”

Considering these new fiscal realities, the researchers and clinicians in the Lymphoma Program at Weill Cornell Medical College are adjusting accordingly. They will continue to do all that they can to deliver the latest in ground breaking research and clinical care.

Click here to use the ASH advocacy tool to contact your Representative and Senators about protecting medical research. Contact information for individual Representatives and Senators can be found here and here.

Research Study: Dietary Cholesterol Associated with Increased Cancer Risk, Including NHL

A study published last year in Annals of Oncology found that dietary cholesterol (found only in animal-based foods, like meat and dairy products) was associated with an increased risk of cancer.

Researchers at the Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Control, Public Health Agency of Canada mailed questionnaires to thousands of men and women with various types of cancers and controls without cancer, asking about their eating habits two years prior to the study to evaluate the amount of cholesterol they consumed.

The researchers found that cholesterol intake was associated with elevated risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, as well as breast cancer (specifically postmenopausal women), and cancers of the stomach, colon, rectum, pancreas, lung, breast cancer , testis, kidney, bladder. People who had the highest intake of cholesterol were 40 to 70 percent more likely to develop these cancers as compared to people with the lowest consumption of cholesterol.

The authors write, “Our findings add to the evidence that high cholesterol intake is linked to increased risk of various cancers. A diet low in cholesterol may play a role in the prevention of several cancers.”