plus 4, New recommendations suggest breast cancer screening should start at 40 - New Kerala |
- New recommendations suggest breast cancer screening should start at 40 - New Kerala
- Montreal Singer Lhasa Dies of Breast Cancer at 37 - S spinner
- Novel way to kill treatment-resistant breast cancer stem cells - Newstrack India
- How Politics Destroyed a Great TV Show - Commentary Magazine
- Synovis Life Technologies to Distribute GEM(TM) SuperFine(TM ... - Stockhouse
| New recommendations suggest breast cancer screening should start at 40 - New Kerala Posted: 05 Jan 2010 08:20 AM PST Washington, Jan 5 : The American College of Radiology (ACR) and the Society of Breast Imaging (SBI) have issued recommendations calling for breast cancer screening to begin at age 40 and even earlier for high-risk patients.
The guidelines also suggest appropriate utilization of medical imaging modalities such as mammography, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and ultrasound for breast cancer screening. "The significant decrease in breast cancer mortality, which amounts to nearly 30 percent since 1990, is a major medical success and is due largely to earlier detection of breast cancer through mammography screening," said Carol H. Lee. "For women with the highest risk of developing breast cancer, screening technologies in addition to mammography have been adopted," Lee added. The recommendations released by the SBI and ACR include recommendations for imaging screening for breast cancer by imaging technique (mammography, MRI, and ultrasound) and by risk factor. The recommendations state that the average patient should begin annual breast cancer screening at age 40. High-risk patients should begin by age 30 but not before 25. "Evidence to support the recommendation for regular periodic screening mammography comes from the results of several randomized trials (RCTs) conducted in Europe and North America that included a total of nearly 500,000 women. Overall, based on a meta-analysis of the RCTs, there was a 26 percent reduction in mortality," said Lee. "It should be remembered that mammography is the only imaging modality that has been proven to decrease mortality from breast cancer. However major efforts continue to build on this success by developing additional methods to screen for early breast cancer. "The SBI and ACR wish to remind women and their physicians that in those instances in which there is a concern that risk of developing cancer is considerably elevated from that of the general population, consultation with appropriate experts in breast cancer genetics and/or high risk management is desirable," she added. The recommendations have been published in the January issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology (JACR). --ANI
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| Montreal Singer Lhasa Dies of Breast Cancer at 37 - S spinner Posted: 03 Jan 2010 10:13 PM PST  Sad rumours began spreading around the Internet over the weekend that Montreal-based Mexican-American singer-songwriter Lhasa de Sela had passed away. Late Sunday night, the news became official when Lhasa's record label Audiogram confirmed what so many had feared.On Friday, Jan. 1, "just before midnight," Lhasa de Sela died at the age of 37 in her Montreal home following a 21-month struggle with breast cancer. Her health issues became widely known last fall when Lhasa was forced to cancel a lengthy international tour on the heels of the US release of her self-titled third album, which was recorded during her struggle with cancer.
Lhasa's gypsy-like upbringing -- seven years spent roaming Mexico and the US with her parents and siblings on a converted school-bus -- influenced her later music, an intense, eloquent and international concoction. She debuted with her award-winning, Spanish-language album 'La Llorona' in 1997 followed by 2003's multi-lingual and multi-genre 'The Living Road' and last spring's self-produced and Polaris Prize long-listed English album 'Lhasa,' which again melded gospel, blues, country, folk and other musical forms into a uniquely gorgeous whole. Combined, her albums have sold over a million copies and touched every last listener. Lhasa leaves in mourning her partner Ryan, her sprawling family, friends, fans and "cat Isaan." Perhaps the world is mourning, too, as the official release sadly notes, "It has snowed more than 40 hours in Montreal since Lhasa's departure." Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Novel way to kill treatment-resistant breast cancer stem cells - Newstrack India Posted: 05 Jan 2010 12:56 AM PST
Washington, Jan 5 (ANI): Scientists at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Centre have discovered a novel way of targeting breast cancer cells that are resistant to current treatments. They have identified a receptor called, CXCR1, on the cancer stem cells, which triggers growth of stem cells in response to inflammation and tissue damage.
A drug originally developed to prevent organ transplant rejection blocks this receptor, killing breast cancer stem cells and preventing their metastasis in mice. "Developing treatments to effectively target the cancer stem cell population is essential for improving outcomes," said senior study author Max S. Wicha, M.D., Distinguished Professor of Oncology and director of the U-M Comprehensive Cancer Centre. "This work suggests a new strategy to target cancer stem cells that can be readily translated into the clinic," Wicha added. CXCR1 is a receptor for Interleukin-8, or IL-8, a protein produced during chronic inflammation and tissue injury. The study showed that when tumours were exposed to chemotherapy, the dying cells produce IL-8, which stimulates cancer stem cells to replicate. The addition of the drug repertaxin to chemotherapy specifically targets and kills breast cancer stem cells by blocking CXCR1. Mice treated with repertaxin or the combination of repertaxin and chemotherapy had dramatically fewer cancer stem cells than those treated with chemotherapy alone. In addition, repertaxin-treated mice developed significantly fewer metastases than mice treated with chemotherapy alone. "These studies suggest that important links between inflammation, tissue damage and breast cancer may be mediated by cancer stem cells," Wicha said. "Furthermore, anti-inflammatory drugs such as repertaxin may provide a means of blocking these interactions, thereby targeting breast cancer stem cells," Wicha added. The study appears in Journal of Clinical Investigation. (ANI) Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| How Politics Destroyed a Great TV Show - Commentary Magazine Posted: 05 Jan 2010 12:02 PM PST How Politics Destroyed a Great TV Show
Either you are with me, or you are my enemy!" shouted a young Darth Vader in 2005's Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, one of the execrable prequels to the original films by George Lucas. In response to this all-or-nothing provocation, a disgusted Obi-Wan Kenobi replies, "Only a Sith deals in absolutes!" Siths are Jedi Knights who have given themselves over to the Dark Side by embracing the evil emotions of anger, envy, and revenge. Readers of Commentary can be forgiven for neither knowing nor caring about this. But it is worth noting that for millions of Star Wars enthusiasts, it was very serious stuff indeed. Lucas revived, if not reinvented, the entire genre of science fiction in the 1970s by embracing bold and mythic depictions of good and evil and the heroic battle of the former against the latter. For decades, the established premise of the Star Wars franchise was that the universe is divided into the Dark Side and the Light Side of the "Force." Jedi Knights—champions of all that is noble and virtuous—were warned never to give in, even a little, to the Dark Side, lest they lose their souls. If all that is not about "absolutes," then what on earth (or in a galaxy far, far away) is? And Lucas threw it all away to get in a dig at George W. Bush. His swipe at Bush's famous iteration of the doctrine that would bear his name—"You are either with us or against us"—in a few seconds unraveled the entire moral superstructure of the Star Wars franchise. Such gratuitous political self-indulgence saturated the popular culture during the Bush years, in fare that had absolutely nothing to do with the policies of the White House. In the two (awful) sequels to The Matrix, a -science-fiction hit about humans being used as a fuel source by a world overtaken by machines, Bush is visually compared to Adolf Hitler. In the Pixar film Wall-E, the "global CEO" of an environmentally devastated Planet Earth apes Bush's "stay the course" line. In -X-Files: I Want to Believe, Bush and J. Edgar Hoover are paired. On television, Bush hatred or liberal antiwar paranoia suffused the NBC series Law and Order like a metastasizing cancer. The hospital show Grey's Anatomy, the attorney show Boston Legal, the cop show Bones, and even the mother-daughter show Gilmore Girls included notable and needless instances, some playful and others less so, of what Charles Krauthammer dubbed Bush Derangement Syndrome. In most of these cases, political asides can be shrugged off. Hollywood is a very liberal place, Bush and the war were indeed very unpopular, so expecting producers and actors to escape the temptation to get their shots in would be like expecting them to treat global warming with skepticism. Denouncing the ideological intrusion into the dialogue of Grey's Anatomy as a corruption of artistic integrity offers such televised junk more respect than it deserves. After all, few can look upon Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and wistfully ponder what might have been. _____________
A remake of a campy 1970s science-fiction series made in the wake of the box-office receipts of the original Star Wars, the gritty, intelligent, and pensive Battlestar Galactica came as a startling surprise upon the premiere of the six-hour miniseries that began its run in 2003. The story line involves a futuristic human civilization spanning 12 planetary colonies. Robots (called Cylons) originally invented to serve as slaves evolve into sentient enemies bent on destroying their former masters. In the original series, the Cylons were depicted as fairly absurd tin men. In the new version, the evolved Cylons are human doppelgängers capable of infiltrating human society (the tin men, far more frightening this time, are still around but serve as shock troops). The doppelgängers are also essentially immortal—if one is killed, his or her consciousness is instantly transmitted into a new, identical body. In the debut miniseries, we are introduced to a civilization very much like our own: open, decent, democratic. In fulfillment of a supposedly divine plan, the Cylons spread out among humanity's 20 billion people, taking advantage of that openness and decency, as well as society's boredom with military preparedness (memories of the last Cylon war have faded away). They orchestrate a 9/11 on a genocidal scale, murdering the vast majority of humanity in a perfectly timed nuclear cataclysm. An aging battlestar called Galactica—essentially a space-borne aircraft carrier—poised to become a museum exhibit narrowly escapes the -Armageddon with a tiny ragtag convoy of humanity's survivors. Outmatched, outgunned, and outstrategized, they must all try to survive against a foe that needs no rest and has no conscience. These premises gave Battlestar Galactica an ideal foundation to play off the headlines of the day. Indeed, as Newsweek's Joshua Alston noted in December 2008, Battlestar Galactica captured "better than any other TV drama of the past eight years the fear, uncertainty and moral ambiguity of the post-9/11 world." The tensions between security and freedom, civilian and military leadership, healthy fear versus debilitating phobia, were explored brilliantly. The series won Program of the Year from the Television Critics Association, as well as numerous other awards. Time hailed it as the best thing on television in 2005, and the series earned a ranking in its top 100 TV shows of all time. From National Review to Rolling Stone, the series was justifiably hailed for its gritty realism, superb acting, and deft direction. Originally, the series was very difficult to pigeonhole ideologically. An avid student of martial culture, Ron Moore, its guiding creative hand, treated the military with deep respect. William Adama, Galactica's commander, is not a coffeehouse philosophe indulging his cosmopolitan sensibilities (the way Patrick Stewart's Jean-Luc Picard often did in the second iteration of the Star Trek franchise in the 1980s), but a gruff and stalwart leader. Laura Roslin (played by Mary McDonnell) is a saccharine liberal do-gooder accidentally thrust into the position of president who achieves a flinty toughness—and makes an unexpected ideological journey of her own when she decides that abortion cannot be tolerated with the human population reduced to a mere 50,000 souls. Inevitably and justifiably, the show dealt with various "enemy within" themes, but unlike countless rehashes of The Crucible, Battlestar Galactica conceded that there actually was an enemy within. The enemy was very real, literally an existential foe guilty of murdering 20 billion people, not just the hobgoblin of alleged McCarthyite paranoia. Peace activists are depicted, at times, as deluded, dangerous, and even vaguely traitorous, giving the impression that at least some of the writers were familiar with Orwell's writings on wartime pacifists. And the frightening nature of the relentless suicide-bomber-attack machine was indelibly captured by the sensational concept that any Cylon killed in battle could simply be resurrected to fight another day. Though the show received raves from writers and critics associated with the Right, Battlestar Galactica was in no way a conservative document. Numerous subplots were congenial to liberal sensibilities, as when President Roslin's breast cancer is cured with embryonic stem cells. But hawkish arguments and assumptions were portrayed with integrity. The regrettable trade-offs implicit in any war, particularly a war to prevent total extinction, were treated as real. _____________
The third season opens with most of humanity—exhausted by war, deprivation, and internal divisions—settling on a bleak, barely habitable planet. Suddenly the Cylons, after annihilating all but .00025 percent of humanity, decide they want to live in peace. But rather than leave humans alone, they conclude the best way to achieve this goal would be to invade this last tiny outpost of humanity and forcibly convert them to the one true god (in the series, the Cylons are monotheists, while the humans are polytheists) . . . or something. The truth is that the audience was never given a remotely decipherable, never mind plausible, explanation for this radically bizarre and nonsensical turn of events. Rather, it was simply asserted in a hodgepodge of babbling dialogue. Almost immediately, the show's protagonists are transformed into "insurgents" who have little or no compunction about becoming suicide bombers. The Cylons, for their part, are finding the human colony very troublesome. In one particularly ham-fisted scene, one of the Cylon leaders mocks his colleagues: "How did you think the humans would greet us? With— 'Oh, never mind'?" This is, of course, a naked reference to the idea expressed before the American invasion, that the war in Iraq would be a "cakewalk." Most egregiously, the human suicide bombers are not young men brainwashed in a madrassa and promised eternal life with 72 virgins, nor are they threatened with the murder of their families—the tactics used by jihadists to create their human bombs. Rather, they are decent, calm, and composed men and women fighting in a noble cause. Taken seriously, this romanticization of suicide bombers and "insurgency" has a cascade of revolting implications. The insurgency in Iraq was not an authentic resistance like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising or De Gaulle's Free French forces. The ranks of terrorists in Iraq were overwhelmingly made up of Baathist remnants of the Hussein regime and al-Qaeda interlopers with their own imperialist ambitions for a worldwide umma. The extent of the show's political and ideological corruption is best exemplified by the fact that one of the central pillars of the series had to be yanked: the notion that the Cylons had a grand, complex, conspiratorial plan involving their human doppelgängers that was unfolding inexorably over the course of the show's run, one that humans needed to uncover in order to secure a victory in the war for the survival of their species. Indeed, every episode of the first three seasons began with an opening sequence in which the viewer is explicitly told that the Cylons "have a plan." But in the third season, a Cylon leader explains that "plans change," whereupon the Cylon quest to exterminate the human race simply evaporates so the show can riff on the evils of "occupation." By the premiere of the fourth season, the Cylon plan was no longer mentioned during the opening credits. And every other seed of plot that had been planted over the previous years was left untended and forgotten as well. Thus, a show marked by gritty realism about how a decent but flawed civilization modeled on our own tries to cling to its decency while fighting an existential war against an implacable enemy veered wildly off course. The humans were no longer analogized to Americans; rather Americans were analogized to genocidal occupiers. In other words, we are no longer the inspiration for the futuristic Israelites trying to survive. We are now the Nazis. With this turnabout, left-wing writers suddenly fell in love with the show. Battlestar Galactica had "morphed into a stinging allegorical critique of America's three-year occupation of Iraq," cheered a writer in the liberal American Prospect. Spencer Ackerman, then an employee of the New Republic, wrote a piece for Slate titled "Battlestar: Iraqtica—Does the hit television show support the Iraqi insurgency?" His unequivocal conclusion: "In unmistakable terms, Battlestar: Galactica is telling viewers that insurgency (like, say, the one in Iraq) might have some moral flaws, such as the whole suicide bombing thing, but is ultimately virtuous and worthy of support. Wow." That "wow" is celebratory. After the Iraq story line, Battlestar Galactica deteriorated rapidly over the course of its final two seasons. The plot shift led the show's writers and producers into a bizarre and meandering world of visiting angels, pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, and deus-ex-machina literary devices. Human and Cylon fell in love; robots killed themselves; a key character's death and resurrection were never explained; and in the end it turned out that everything we were watching had led to the population of our Earth 150,000 years ago and that we were heading in a similar direction because we have some robots now too. The disappointment among the show's fans was palpable, and its final episode provoked widespread rage-—there is no other word for it—among those who had followed the series passionately for the previous five years and felt they had been tricked by its conclusion. No doubt the producers believe it was all worth it. For having the "bravery" to tackle the occupation of Iraq, the producers and lead actors were invited to a panel at the United Nations to dilate on the war on terror. It is hard to imagine that would have happened if the series had held to its original course. Ron Moore told Salon in 2007 that "the show's mission is not to present answers to what I think are really complicated, difficult questions. One of the mistakes TV often makes is that it tries to tackle complicated moral and legal issues and wrap them up in an hour and give you a neat, tidy message by the end: 'And here's the way to solve Iraq!' I don't think that's helpful, and I don't think that's good storytelling or great to watch. Our mission is more about asking questions, asking the audience to think about things, to think about uncomfortable things, to question their own assumptions." It's been said that the difference between the truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. After its third season, Battlestar Galactica steadily failed on both counts. These failures are attributable not just to the allure of ideology and the desire to stay "relevant" but also to Moore's fraudulent notion that merely "asking questions" isn't itself a form of ideological commitment. Indeed, most propaganda is often posed in the form of invidious questions. A merely loaded question—have you stopped beating your wife yet?—is one thing. An invidious question is one in which evil fictions are given parity with truth. "I'm not saying the Holocaust didn't happen, I'm just raising important questions." Joshua Alston's conclusion that Battlestar Galactica best captures the fear, uncertainty, and ambiguity of the post-9/11 world still holds up, but with a thick layer of irony. For the series's story arc demonstrates that Moore and Company were not immune to the pressures of the post-9/11 world. Indeed, it reveals instead that they could not handle those pressures. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Synovis Life Technologies to Distribute GEM(TM) SuperFine(TM ... - Stockhouse Posted: 05 Jan 2010 10:07 AM PST Synovis MCA Launching Product at January 6-12 Microsurgical Conferences ST. PAUL, Minn., Jan 05, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Synovis Life Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: SYNO), a leading biomaterial and surgical products company, announced today that its wholly owned subsidiary, Synovis Micro Companies Alliance, Inc. (Synovis MCA), has received exclusive worldwide distribution rights to sell the GEM(TM) SuperFine(TM) MicroClip(TM). This new product is the smallest clip on the market today and is designed to stop bleeding during surgical procedures. Microsurgeons will use the GEM SuperFine MicroClip in various specialties -- plastic and reconstructive, head and neck, orthopedic and hand -- in procedures ranging from breast reconstruction to tissue grafts following cancer surgery and the reattachment or repair of fingers and limbs. "Technological advances allow surgeons to work on smaller and smaller anatomical structures," said Richard W. Kramp, Synovis Life Technologies president and chief executive officer. "The GEM SuperFine MicroClip keeps pace with changing needs in the microsurgical market and furthers Synovis MCA's goal of serving as 'The Microsurgeon's Most Trusted Resource(TM)'." The GEM SuperFine MicroClip is made of pure, annealed titanium for a malleable consistency that allows for zero memory which prevents the tip from opening after application. The clip is biologically inert, and the non-ferrous titanium is safe for use with MRI or related scanning equipment. The unique chevron shape of the GEM SuperFine MicroClip provides progressive and encompassing tip-to-tip closure for secure vessel occlusions. The diamond shape grooving and interlocking atraumatic teeth on the clip's inner surface ensure a firm multi-direction non-crushing grip. Additionally, the ergonomically designed cartridge includes an adhesive backing for precise and effortless clip loading. Synovis MCA currently distributes the GEM MicroClip, which has been very well received by customers, through its U.S. sales force and distributors around the world. The GEM SuperFine MicroClip, which is 35 percent smaller than the GEM MicroClip, is an extension of this product line. Synovis MCA will showcase the GEM SuperFine MicroClip at the Annual Scientific Meetings of the American Society for Reconstructive Microsurgery (ASRM), American Association for Hand Surgery (AAHS), and American Society for Peripheral Nerve (ASPN) to be held concurrently January 6-12, 2010, in Boca Raton, Florida. About Synovis Life Technologies Synovis Life Technologies, Inc., based in St. Paul, Minn., develops, manufactures and markets mechanical and biological products used by several surgical specialties for the repair of soft tissue damaged or destroyed by disease or injury. The company's products are designed to reduce risks and/or facilitate critical surgeries, improve patient outcomes and reduce healthcare costs. For additional information on Synovis Life Technologies and its products, visit the company's Web site at www.synovislife.com. Forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The statements can be identified by words such as "should", "could", "may", "will", "expect", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate", "continue", or other similar expressions. Certain important factors that could cause results to differ materially from those anticipated by the forward-looking statements made herein include the timing of product introductions, the ability of our expanded direct sales force to grow revenues, outcomes of clinical and marketing studies as well as regulatory submissions, the number of certain surgical procedures performed, the ability to identify, acquire and successfully integrate suitable acquisition candidates (such as the recently acquired Orthopedic and Woundcare products), any operational or financial impact of the current global economic downturn, as well as the other factors found in the company's reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission, including on the company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended October 31, 2009. SOURCE: Synovis Life Technologies, Inc. Padilla Speer Beardsley Inc. Nancy A. Johnson, 612-455-1745 or Marian Briggs, 612-455-1742 or Synovis Life Technologies, Inc. Richard Kramp, President and CEO, 651-796-7300 or Brett Reynolds, CFO, 651-796-7300 Copyright Business Wire 2010Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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