Skin Cancer & You

Imagine this future of personalized healthcare: you have been diagnosed with a disease for which there are five different treatments, your doctor feeds your genetic details into a computer, and the virtual human in the machine suggests which of the five is likely to be most effective and have fewer side effects for you personally...

It's impossible to know, unless you're Urban Meyer or one of his doctors, what exactly caused the two-time college football championship winner to see-saw decisions about his prestigious professional career and his family life. But the scenario is all too common among Americans of all walks of life. Meyer just provides a high-profile reminder of how important heart health is. "All too often, we see patients who have their wake-up calls after a serious heart attack...

Young people aged under 18 years are more likely than adults to catch swine flu from an infected person in their household, according to a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. However, the research also shows that young people are no more likely than adults to infect others with the pandemic H1N1 virus...

A vascular surgical technique pioneered at UT Southwestern Medical Center and designed to replace infected aortic grafts with the body's own veins has proved more durable and less prone to new infection than similar procedures using synthetic and cadaver grafts. Aortic graft infections are one of the most serious complications in patients undergoing aortic grafting procedures for peripheral arterial disease (PAD) and aortic aneurysms...

Achy knees and joints caused by arthritis are not reasons to stop exercising. Regular, modest exercise improves joint stability and strengthens muscles, according to the December issue of Mayo Clinic Women's HealthSource. Exercise also improves mood, sleep, energy levels and day-to-day functioning. Best of all, people with arthritis who exercise regularly report less pain. When a person avoids exercise, joints become less mobile and the surrounding muscles shrink, causing increased fatigue and pain...

UroToday.com - In the December, 2009 online edition of the Journal of Urology, Drs. Caroline Savage and Andrew Vickers from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center show surprising data on how few radical prostatectomies (RP) many American urologists perform. The authors cite previous work that correlates surgical volume with complication rates and outcomes. Complications are 20% less in the highest vs. lowest quartile of surgeon volumes. Also, the surgical learning curve is reached at 250 RPs, with a 10.9% risk of disease recurrence at 5 years compared with 17...

UroToday.com - Ours is a retrospective review of patients who underwent open retroperitoneal lymph node dissection between 2001-2008. We identified perioperative data for patients who underwent primary (P-RPLND) versus post-chemotherapy RPLND (PC-RPLND) and found mean blood loss, operative duration and hospital stay to be significantly less for the former group (P This contemporary data should be considered when comparing open versus laparoscopic RPLND (L-RPLND)...

UroToday.com - Management of advanced renal cell carcinoma remains an extremely difficult scenario in urologic oncology. In the setting of non-metastatic renal carcinoma with tumor thrombus invading into the inferior vena cava, complete extirpirative surgery, including thrombectomy and nephrectomy has been shown to have acceptable oncologic and long-term outcomes for the patients [1, 2]. Surgical techniques for such operations have been extensively debated in the literature...

UroToday.com - The impact of body mass index (BMI) on PSA levels is small according to a report by Dr. Stacy Loeb and colleagues from Johns Hopkins University and the National Institute on Aging that appears in the December, 2009 online edition of the Journal of Urology. The problem is defined by the fact that in 2001-2002, 65.7% of Americans were overweight or obese, as defined by a BMI of 25.0 to 29.9 and 30kg/m2 or greater, respectively. In addition, several studies have noted a correlation between increased BMI and more aggressive pathological features and worse outcomes...

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center scientist M. Elizabeth "Betz" Halloran, M.D., M.P.H., D.S.c., has been awarded the distinction of AAAS Fellow. Election as a Fellow is an honor bestowed upon members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, by their peers. Halloran is a researcher in the Hutchinson Center's Vaccine and Infectious Disease Institute and a professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington...