• Brain tumors, benign or cancerous, could be life threatening. Cancer in children is a rare disease, yet next to accidents, it is the second leading cause of death among children. And next to leukemia, brain tumors are the most common cancers in children. North American Brain Tumor Coalition is a network of charitable organizations, dedicated to increase public awareness of the problem, to educate and help patients. To obtain more information, call 1-800-753-5877.

• Vitamins such as A, C, and E and/or folate intake throughout pregnancy may reduce the risk of having a child who would develop brain tumor by the age of five.

• Diagnosis of breast cancer closer to last childbirth has negative effect on prognosis. Both five-year and 10-year survival is significantly reduced.

• Increased body weight has diverging effect on incidence of breast cancer in pre- and postmenopausal women. High body fat seems to protect premenopausal women from incidence, but not from mortality. In postmenopausal women, however, obesity increases the risk of both breast cancer incidence and mortality.

• Growth hormone treatment in postmenopausal women to correct bone and muscle loss may increase their risk of developing breast cancer.

• Sensitive polymerase chain reaction-based techniques can identify a small number of cancer cells spread to local lymph nodes in prostate cancer patients with localized disease which cannot be detected by conventional pathological technique. If standardized, this supersensitive molecular technique can be used to screen and stratify prostate cancer patients for effective treatment.

• Modification of the amino terminals of the core histones of nucleosomes by acetyltransferases and deacetylases may be involved in nucleosomal assembly and the regulation of gene expression.

• The diverse views in the cancer establishment on the pros and cons of screening and early detection of prostate cancer is presented.

• Kytril tablets, granisteron hydrochloride, when administered in combination with dexamethasone, and prochlorperazine effectively suppressed nausea and vomiting episodes in patients undergoing high-dose chemo-therapy.

• At present, the determination of multiple-drug resistance (MDR) is of major importance, since MDR causes chemotherapy failure; if known – either at the time of surgery or during further treatment – the choice of drugs, their mode of administration, dosage and schedules could be optimized. Drug resistance has evolved into a complex problem, with multiple factors contributing to this phenomenon and new factors still being discovered; some resistance mechanisms act in concert, others appear in sequence or de novo. There may even be variations endemic to a particular patient, which in turn makes the avoidance or circumvention of MDR difficult. Additional information on resistance mechanisms and their "markers" is therefore very welcome.

• Clearly, regrowth resistance is not resistance to regrowth; rather, it is regrowth, resistant to therapy. In principle, all post-surgical treatment of cancer aims at cytoreduction of residual tumor cells; if successful, their number is minimal and requires more time to reach a clinically recognizable mass, that is, it delays recurrence. So far, the great majority of various treatment protocols (both chemo- and radiation therapy or combinations thereof) fail to induce a cure or "complete remission" – which is a vague, open-ended term. This failure is caused either by small numbers of resistant cancer cells, which were present in the original, heterogeneous tumor mass at diagnosis or by the growth of cells selected by the pressure of cytotoxic therapy. However, this logical and now widely accepted thinking may have reduced our options and has perhaps oversimplified a more complex situation. The observation that at least in some cancers, drug sensitive tumor cells regrow and remain sensitive to the same treatment points to another interpretation: regrowth resistance (which is not a well chosen term, but requires consideration).

• Secondary infection is a problem in patients who are especially immunocompromised because of a disease or due to particular treatment. And increasing trend of such infection is particularly noticed in children with cancer. One of the problems in controlling infection is the development of resistance to drugs. One such infectious agent that is resistant to multiple antibiotics is Streptococci of human intestine. New antimicrobial agents with improved activity against this bacteria are needed, and in the absence of effective therapy, control of their spread is essential. To combat Herpes simplex virus (HSV) infection in immunocompromised patients penciclovir instead of standard acyclovir is better because less frequent dosage can be used.

Glossary

• A glossary of unfamiliar words and jargons in Cancer Watch, November 1997.