(Press-News.org) CHICAGO – Sept. 6, 2012. Married patients with locally advanced lung cancer are likely to survive longer after treatment than patients who are single, according to a study by researchers at the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center in Baltimore. The results of the retrospective study are being presented at the 2012 Chicago Multidisciplinary Symposium in Thoracic Oncology.
The University of Maryland researchers studied 168 patients with Stage III non-small cell lung cancer, the most common type of lung cancer, who were treated with chemotherapy and radiation over a 10-year-period, from January 2000 and December 2010. They found that 33 percent of married patients were still alive after three years compared to 10 percent of the single patients, with women faring better than men. Married women had the best three-year survival rate (46 percent), and single men had the worst rate (3 percent). Single women and married men had the same 25 survival rate at three years. White married patients had a better survival rate than married African-Americans.
"Marital status appears to be an important independent predictor of survival in patients with locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer," says the study's lead author, Elizabeth Nichols, M.D., a radiation oncology resident at the University of Maryland Greenebaum Cancer Center. "The reason for this is unclear, but our findings suggest the importance of social support in managing and treating our lung cancer patients. Patients may need help with day-to-day activities, getting to treatment and making sure they receive proper follow-up care."
"We believe that better supportive care and support mechanisms for cancer patients can have a greater impact on increasing survival than many new cancer therapy techniques. Not only do we need to continue to focus on finding new drugs and cancer therapies, but also on ways to better support our cancer patients," says Dr. Nichols, who collaborated on the study with senior faculty at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
The study's senior author, Steven J. Feigenberg, M.D., an associate professor of radiation oncology at the School of Medicine, says additional research is planned. "We need to better understand why marriage is a factor in our patients' survival," says Dr. Feigenberg, who is also a radiation oncologist at the University of Maryland Greenebaum Cancer Center. "We're also trying to determine if these findings can be corroborated in the multi-institutional setting,"
E. Albert Reece, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., vice president for medical affairs at the University of Maryland and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, says, "Lung cancer is the No. 1 cause of cancer death in both men and women, and this study by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine suggests that having a spouse who can act as a caregiver may improve survival for patients with this type of cancer. We must figure out ways to help all of our cancer patients live longer, with a better quality of life, regardless of their marital status."
The patients in the study were evaluated by a multidisciplinary team of radiation oncologists, surgeons and medical oncologists at the Greenebaum Cancer Center and were treated with a standard combination of radiation and chemotherapy, typically followed by additional rounds of chemotherapy. With a mean follow-up of a year and four months, the mean survival was 13 months. Researchers used an analysis tool to estimate overall survival, with 21 percent of the patients alive at three years and 12 percent at five years.
Previous studies have found decreased survival for single men diagnosed with several types of cancer, including prostate and head-and-neck cancers. A study of 440,000 Norwegian men and women, published last year, found that men who never married were 35 percent more likely to die from cancer than married men. Never-married women were 22 percent more likely to die of cancer than those who were married. The study looked at deaths from 13 common cancers.
###
The 2012 Chicago Multidisciplinary Symposium in Thoracic Oncology is sponsored by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO), the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC), and the University of Chicago.
About the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center
The University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center is a National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center, which is part of the University of Maryland Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine. The center is recognized for its active clinical and basic science research program. It has comprehensive programs to treat all types of cancer and is a major referral center for patients throughout Maryland and the region. It has been recognized as one of the top 15 cancer centers in the nation by U.S. News & World Report in 2012-13. For more information about the center, go to www.umgcc.org.
Nichols EM, Liriano M, Morris CG, Burrows W, Battafarano R, Garofalo M, Feliciano J, Turner M, Suntha M, Edelman M, Feigenberg SJ
END
Chicago – (Sept. 6, 2012) – Savvy consumers and health professionals know that fibre is an essential nutrient associated with important health benefits, yet barriers such as overall poor tolerance to higher-fibre diets may be why average intake is far less than experts recommend (1). Two new research studies supported by Tate & Lyle, the global provider of specialty food ingredients and solutions, provide further evidence that certain higher-fibre diets can in fact be well-tolerated, and that fibre may play an important role in supporting a healthy gut as well as promoting ...
The study, published today in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention is the largest of its kind in Australia and one of the largest in the world. It followed about 4,000 women in a study of the BreastScreen program in Western Australia.
University of Melbourne Research Fellow Dr Carolyn Nickson and colleagues from the Melbourne School of Population Health said the findings reaffirmed the importance and efficacy of mammography.
The study focused on women aged 50-69 years, who are in the target age range for screening. It included 427 cases where women had died ...
Off Hachinohe, Japan—Scientific deep sea drilling vessel Chikyu sets a world new record by drilling down and obtains rock samples from deeper than 2,111 meters below the seafloor off Shimokita Peninsula of Japan in the northwest Pacific Ocean. The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), the implementing organization for scientific expedition aboard the Chikyu, announced this achievement on 6th September, 2012.
Chikyu made this achievement during the Deep Coalbed Biosphere expedition, Expedition 337, conducted within the framework of an international ...
People who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder relive their traumatic experiences in the form of flashbacks and nightmares – and in childhood, also in traumatic plays during which they re-enact the experience over and over again. They avoid stimuli that remind them of the trauma or suffer from vegetative hyperarousal such as insomnia, hypervigilance or concentration problems. For the first time, researchers from the University of Zurich and the University Children's Hospital Zurich now show that infants and toddlers can also develop posttraumatic stress disorder in ...
Sophia Antipolis, 6 September 2012: The European Association for Cardiovascular Prevention and Rehabilitation (EACPR), a registered branch of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), and the American Heart Association (AHA) have today issued a joint scientific statement http://eurheartj.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/08/24/eurheartj.ehs221.short?rss=1 that sets out to produce easy-to-follow guidance on Clinical Cardiopulmonary Exercise (CPX) testing based on current scientific evidence. The document, which has been published simultaneously online in the European ...
A unique approach to early literacy work with families where children develop their language skills and their ability to read and write from an early age has had a huge success.
Researchers from the University of Sheffield funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) initially planned to use the approach with around 60 families, but discovered that around 6,000 had actually benefited from their work.
Professor Cathy Nutbrown of the University of Sheffield, who led the project, shared her approach to family literacy with Early Years practitioners including ...
This press release is available in German.
It had been thought that mothers delivering later in life have children that are less healthy as adults, because the body of the mother had already degenerated due to physiological effects like decreasing oocyte quality or a weakened placenta. In fact, what affects the health of the grown-up children is not the age of their mother but her education and the number of years she survives after giving birth and thus spends with her offspring. This is the conclusion of a new study by Mikko Myrskylä from the Max Planck Institute for ...
Jerusalem, Sept. 6, 2012 – A synthetic, anti-inflammatory and anti-allergic family of drugs to combat a variety of illnesses while avoiding detrimental side effects has been developed by a Hebrew University of Jerusalem researcher.
The researcher is Saul Yedgar, who is the Walter and Greta Stiel Professor of Heart Studies at the Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada at the Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine.
Inflammatory/allergic diseases affect billions of people worldwide, and treatments for these conditions are a major focus of the pharmaceutical industry. ...
Scientists from A*STAR's Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences (SICS), together with clinical collaborators from London , discovered for the first time that children and young patients with chronic Hepatitis B Virus infection (HBV carriers) do have a protective immune response, contrary to current belief, and hence can be more suitable treatment candidates than previously considered.
This discovery by the team of scientists led by Professor Antonio Bertoletti, programme director and research director of the infection and immunity programme at SICS, could lead to ...
On Mars's poles there are ice caps of ice and dust with layers that reflect to past climate variations on Mars. Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have related the layers in the ice cap on Mars's north pole to variations in solar insolation on Mars, thus established the first dated climate history for Mars, where ice and dust accumulation has been driven by variations in insolation. The results are published in the scientific journal, Icarus.
The ice caps on Mars's poles are kilometres thick and composed of ice and dust. There are layers in the ice caps, which ...
