Hooking 'Em Young

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health say big tobacco hooks  young smokers by manipulating the amount of menthol put in cigarettes marketed to them, a charge the companies dispute. "Menthol stimulates the cooling receptors in the lung and oral pharynx," Dr. Gregory Connolly of the Harvard School of Public Health tells Reuters Health. "It makes smoking easier." Read the whole story here.

At the same time, Canadian researchers report most teenagers try to stop smoking after taking their first puff but only 19 percent actually managed to stop smoking for 12 months or more by the end of the five-year study. Read more about this study here.

Sunscreen

More than a million cases of skin cancer are diagnosed every year among Americans. Not all these skin cancers are the most deadly kind, malignant melanoma. In fact, most are  either basal cell carcinomas or squamous cell carcinomas. But even these non-malignant cancers can become dangerous  and life-threatening if left untreated.  At a minimum, they can result in disfigurement.

We still idolize the bronzed skin despite what health professionals now say are the established facts: too much sun exposure, especially early in life,  increases your risk of developing deadly melanoma as you age and makes your skin look older faster.

Learn about how to protect your skin and the skin of the ones you love with this handout from the Environmental Working Group. (this is a .pdf file and requires adobe acrobat to read.)  Read more about skin cancer on cancerpage here and about sun safety on cancerpage here.

FDA WARNINGS

CT Scans can interfere with drug infusion pumps and other electronic devices like cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators, or neurostimulators.  It's rare, but the FDA warned doctors this week that there have been incidents  - though none fatal - involving  patients undergoing CT scans. Pumps may need to be reprogrammed. Read the release here.

FDA has recalled two lots of a solution used to treat hyperkalemia, an abnormally high potassium level in the blood.  This can be a problem for some cancer patients. A sample of one of the affected 2 lots tested positive for a strain of yeast, which could potentially affect immunocompromised patients. The solution in question is Roxane Laboratories, Inc.'s Sodium Polystyrene Sulfonate Suspension.  You can find the recall notice here.

In The Lab

People who recieve organ transplants have a higher risk of developing a cancer within 10 years of their transplant. Researchers think this may be because of any of three reasons: a pre-existing cancer, a cancer recurrence kept in check by the immune system that is now compromised by anti-rejection medications, or a cancer-causing virus that came along with the transplanted organ.  Now researchers at the Harvard Transplant Center believe they have identified the mechanism involved in the increased cancer risk and a way to throw a wrench in it.  Once the transplanted organ has become stabilized they suggest giving the patient drugs to slow the development of new blood vessels, which the transplanted organ no longer needs anyway. They found that this lowered the cancer risk in lab animals.  Read more about it here.

What if cancer cells could be made magnetic and drawn out of the body with magnets? Scientists at Georgia Tech think they may have found a way through nanotechnology to do something like that.   They attach magnetic nanotech particles to cancer cells, allowing them to be captured and carried out. "This technology may be of special importance in the treatment of ovarian cancer where the malignancy is typically spread by free-floating cancer cells released from the primary tumor into the abdominal cavity," John McDonald, chair of the School of Biology at Georgia Tech and chief research scientist at the Ovarian Cancer Institute said in a release. Read more about it here.