Kidney cancer success
Treatment of notoriously stubborn kidney cancer is moving into a new era, according to oncologists. Results of two Phase 3 trials of targeted therapies, presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Atlanta, showed significant improvements for patients with advanced forms.
“These drugs and more which are in development really do hold promise for longer survival for people with kidney cancer,” said Dr. Gary R. Hudes, director of the genitourinary malignancy program at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. “It’s been a refractory disease. Even two to three years ago, there weren’t many options for these patients.”
Tests using the drugs temsirolimus and sunitinib on the sickest of patients in the two studies showed survival, still involving a matter of months, increasing as much as 50 to 100 percent.
“We are absolutely entering a new era,” added Dr. Robert J. Motzer, attending physician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and lead author of the second trial. “These drugs are resulting in a complete shift toward targeted therapies.”
HPV test tops the Pap
Compared with conventional Pap smears, testing for the human papillomavirus (HPV) caught more precancerous lesions, European researchers report.
In addition, the newer liquid-based Pap test, common in the United States, had marginally improved sensitivity but produced more false positive results, the researchers found.
Their report appears in the June 7 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
“In a large, randomized, controlled trial of women aged 35 to 60 years, HPV testing was more sensitive than traditional cytology in detecting precancerous lesions of the uterine cervix,” said lead researcher Dr. Guglielmo Ronco, from CPO Piemonte, in Turin, Italy.
The results, with three lesions caught for every two by the traditional method, could lead the way for using the HPV test as the first test for women rather than a Pap test, said Debbie Saslow, director of breast and gynecological cancer at the American Cancer Society.
Parental tyranny is fattening
Parenting style affects a child’s weight and whether he will be overweight by 1st grade, a new study found.
“Children of authoritarian parents had five times the risk of being overweight compared to children of authoritative [a more diplomatic style] mothers,” said Dr. Kyung Rhee, a clinical instructor at Boston University School of Medicine and the study’s lead author.
Authoritarian parents are described as strict disciplinarians, Rhee said, while authoritative parents are more respectful of a child’s opinions and thoughts while maintaining boundaries. Two other parenting styles were evaluated by the researchers: Permissive, in which parents are indulgent and don’t practice discipline, and neglectful, in which parents are emotionally uninvolved and don’t set rules.
The findings appear in the June issue of the journal Pediatrics.
Authoritarian parenting was associated with the highest risk of overweight, the researchers found, with the risk five times higher. Children of permissive and neglectful mothers were twice as likely to be overweight as children of authoritative mothers, they also found.
“We were sort of suspecting this would be the case,” Rhee said, “because authoritative parenting has been associated with better outcomes in academic achievement, better self-control, less depressive symptoms, less risk-taking as teens.”
