Cancer

Cancer is, no doubt, one of the deadliest diseases of the last centuries and it affects a lot of people all over the world. It is still a puzzle for specialists because nobody knows for sure what is the exact cause of cancer. We can only speculate about the risk factors and this according to statistics.
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But the funny thing is that, if two people have been exposed to the same risk factors it is very possible for one of them to develop cancer and the other not. That is why scientists and doctors have been trying to find new medicines and make more tests that will allow them to find new improved medicines for fighting against cancer.

This is how we get to Celebrex , also known as Celecoxib, which is an anti-inflammatory drug that does not contain steroids, and which was discovered to have certain beneficial properties in cancer treatment or prevention. Presently this drug is produced by Pfizer and is recommended in such affections like osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, acute pain, painful menstruation.

However, studies have shown that this drug plays an important role in the prevention of several forms of cancer that involve polyp growth, like the colo-rectal cancers. It prevents polyps from appearing or reappearing in the affected area, thus stopping a recurrence of the cancer for example.

There have been a lot of clinical trials that proved its effect in this department and it really is efficient. But , on the other hand, it also induces a serious risk of heart attack and heart related diseases. Apparently Aspirin has the same effect and , of course, it protects the heart and is also a lot cheaper. However, there has never been a comparison trial between the effects of the two drugs.

Celecoxib, the active substance sold under the name of Celebrex or Celebra for arthritis and Onsenal for polyps has appeared in many cancer studies that wanted to find out not only its prevention capabilities, but also its curative effects. During the lab researches and the tests made on lab rats, doctors and scientists have discovered a certain reduction of the cancer tumours during the treatment with Celebrex

However, it is not very clear how it acts and how it does this. Some have claimed that it has something to do with the interaction of Celebrex with a substance that can be found in the cancer cell, called COX-2 and which is inhibited by the treatment with Celebrex, leading to a shrinking of the tumour. Some others said that is prevents the blood vessels in the tumour to grow, thus preventing the tumout to grow. But some more recent studies have found out that this drug had the same effect on cells without COX-2 in their composition, so the result is pretty ambiguous.

In conclusion, there has been a certain reduction in tumours caused by Celebrex, but they don’t know why and they also warn us on the possibly fatal consequences of heart failure induced by Celebrex treatment.

So Celebrex has still a long way to go in cancer studies and is now only in the experimental phase. That is why patients must be clearly informed about both the beneficial effects of the drug, but also about the high risk it implies. I guess only time will tell its relevance in cancer treatment.

I imagine that all of you know by now what is the symbol for breast cancer: the pink ribbon. People from all over the world recognize this symbol, even if it is stylized on some things and they know that a part of the money or even all the money resulted from the sale will be transfered to a fund that helps breast cancer patients or support breast cancer fight by financing the research and the experiments done by doctors and researchers who want to find a cure for breast cancer or at least better ways to fight this terrible disease.
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In time this symbol was combined with different other symbols - like the butterfly that suggests the human fraility and also the hope that keeps all the women with breast cancer still alive. When you watch a butterfly you will first notice its beauty and the wings, the fact that it can fly and people envy butterflies for that

Then you realize that it is enough to stretch your hand and squeeze it in your hand to kill it, so it is really fragile and its life in those moments depends on our mood, on a thought or a change of thought. I guess we can very well put ourselves in the butterfly’s position: apparently we are strong and beautiful being, reaching for the skies with our rockets and space shuttles, but it takes only a second to become so fragile and have our lives threatened by breast cancer and all our existence transformed in a battle for life.

That’s what the first picture means to say, implies that the pink ribbon representing breast cancer can very well be transformed in the butterfly of hope. It is called transformation art. Any way, it’s full of poetry and meaning, a real metaphor that can be used as a very nice picture to be stuck on different items for sale: bags, t-shirts, posters, mouse pads, notebooks and so on. It’s only a method of drawing attention on this problem and at the same time rasie some money for that.

If you want to purchase a few items with the breast cancer butterfly ribbon, you can order here some prints on note pads, sticky pads, greeting cards or even gift enclosures.

The second picture shows a breast cancer butterfly that has its body shaped like the pink ribbon representing breast cancer. It is nicely designed and just beautiful, but full of meanung and also modern, bringing hope and a positive feeling suggested by the colour pink . If you want to order different items with this design on, just follow this link.

You will have the opportunity to purchase some really nice looking things and at the same time help a very noble cause. You will find here women t-shirts, bags, dresses, tops, notebooks, badges, paintings, USB memory sticks, stuffed toys, greeting cards and many other items, all of them having the lovely print of the breast cancer butterfly. And suddenly it is a very positive thing which does not bring the horror of death to mind, but only the beauty of nature.

Cancer is a terrible disease and it has been around for a long time. But scientists still haven’t succeeded to discover a cure against it that would make it less scary and lethal and treated like a simple cold, as many people hope they will one day. Well, at least there has been so much research done in this area, that now scientists and doctors are able to remove more and more complex tumours by surgery and then use radiotherapy and chemotherapy to distroy any possible sick cells left behind.
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However, there are still many situations when cancer tumours can’t be operated because they are too deep in the organ and removing it will permanently damage the respective organ, so the result will be pretty much bad for the patient. But at least this field of activity has progressed a lot and now there are very sophisticated machineries that allow doctors to get to very difficult tumours that were inoperable and untreatable not long before. One of these revolutionary methods is the photon beam therapy that is used in treating cancer. It is a kind of radiation therapy that reaches deep tumours with high energy X-rays made by a linear accelerator.

The photons are the particles that deliver energy in any device that uses electromagnetic radiation beams. This radiatiob beam can be of many different types, like: X rays, gamma radiation, light or microwave. The beam is more powerful if it contains more photons with more energy.

The devices used in the radiotherapy process are called linear accelerator radiotherapy machines and they use cobalt, a very radioactive metal to create the photon beam that is used for treating cancer patients. These machines can be set up to produce the kind of radiation the doctors need for treating a patient with cancer. For example low energy photon beams are used for treating the disease outside the body, like skin cancer or melanoma as it is called, whereas the tumours that are deep inside the body are treated with high energy photon beams.

This way the tumour is bombarded with photon beams and is irradiated directly on its surface without affecting the neighbouring organs. Irradiation therapy is known to produce a shrinking in the size of the tumour and even make it disappear after the treatment is finished and if the cancer is not so widely spread.

Even if radiotherapy is used for a long time now, it wasn’t very successful in the past, as the morbidity was very high and the organs around the affected tissue was also irradiated during treatment. Now the devices providing this photon beam are a lot more accurate and target the cancer cells directly, avoiding all the possible damage to other tissues. So it seems to be more precise and a lot more effective these days.

But , of course, these devices providing the photon bea treatment are really expensive and very few hospitals can afford them and they also need specially trained people to use them, as they require extreme precision and knowledge to be operated. So we can only hope that in the near future every sick person will afford a treatment with such a device.

Oral cancer is a lot more spread nowadays than it used to be in the past. It also has quite a high percentage of mortality when compared to other types of cancer because people do not recognize the symptoms easily and the disease is discovered only in the terminal stages, when it is impossible to save the patient. Oral cancer usually affects the lips, the mouth, the back of the throat, the tonsils or the salivary glands.
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Nobody knows for sure what triggers this disease , but a lot of studies and statistics have been done and they pointed out some major risk factors that might influence this type of cancer to appear in the case of some patients. Apparently the cancer appears in the weakest part of a person’s body and when the entire body is weak due to some factor. This is proven by the incidence of this disease in the case of those people who have suffered from kidney transplant. They do not present any of the risk factors, but they follow a treatment with immunosuppressors that prevent their bodies to reject the new kidney, but at the same time weaken the immune system of their body.

Ok, let’s go back to our main topic of discussion now: the cause and effect of oral cancer. The most important cause of oral cancer is tobacco use. More than 90% of the patients diagnosed with oral cancer used tobacco in one form or another. I think it is important to mention that even if they don’t smoke tobacco, but chew it or snuff it, the chemicals contained in it affect the mouth and the throat, damage the cells in the tissue of these organs and cause abnormal developments in those cells, turning them into cancer cells.

These chemicals affect the DNA of the cells and lead to a mutation that will be then genetically transmitted to the other generations, so the cancer inheritance will also be transmitted.I guess this is cause and effect enough for me.

The second important cause of oral cancer and which is often used in combination with the first one, making the effect even more devastating is alcohol consumption on a large scale. Statistics say that 75-80% of the patients with oral cancer consume alcohol on a daily basis. And the combination of the two above-mentioned killers increases even more the probability of developing this terrible disease. The effect of alcohol consumption is the fact that the chemicals in the alcohol increase the penetration of the substances that mutate the DNA in the healthy cells and turn them into sick cells.

Then there’s the sunlight who can damage your skin and lips if you expose too much to the UV radiation of the sun. This is considered among the strongest causes of lip cancer, which is also a form of oral cancer. HPV infections are also very dangerous, as infection open the gate for a more serious disease to install in the affected organ. People have known this virus of being responsible mainly for such cancer forms like cervical cancer, penis cancer or anal cancer. But it seems like, together with people’s increasing preference for oral sex has lead to an equal increase of oral cancers caused by this virus infection. So many doctors recommend anti-HPV vaccine for both women and men.

Some other risk factors may be :chronic irritation of the mouth that can have as effect the weakness of the organ to fight with germs and bacteria, lack of fruits and vegetables in the diet - that is also considered an unhealthy way of life, leading to the incapacity of the human body of fightin the pathogen agents and also age ( people over 40 are more exposed), gender ( men are more likely to develop this disease than women).

Cancer is no doubt one of the most dangerous and widely spread diseases of the modern times. It is also very unusual because it does not have a favourite organ or part of the body where it locates, but it can appear in every part and affect it and it does not stop there, but it also spreads to the whole body , leaving you no alternative to fight it
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In time people have developed better ways of detecting it in the earlier stages, when it can be removed and the patient treated with radiation and drugs in order to remove any cells left, this way increasing the survival rate. But the biggest problem that people have to face nowadays is the fact that we are surrounded by chemicals that are carcinogens. These substances cause mutations in the human healthy cells and turn them into cancer cells located in different parts of the human body

Because of the huge development of technology and industry in the last century, chemicals are now spread everywhere around us, starting from the food we eat, the drinks that are bottled in the stores, the make-up that women wear on their face and body every day and even the plastic bags and coffee cups seem to be affecting us in a bad way. So if you want a straight answer to the question : “Does make-up cause cancer?” the answer will be “Yes”.

Make-up does cause cancer, but so do half of the things surrounding us every day. If you want to avoid getting sick you will have to be really careful about the ingredients in all the cosmetic products that you buy. The big producers in the cosmetic industry have chosen to add a lot of chemicals in their products because they are cheap, have immediate effect and preserve the products for a long time, so they can be used after staying several months on the shelf of a store. But they consider that the quantity of such dangerous and apparently carcinogenic ingredients is too small to directly affect people using them and cause cancer

.Most of these products have been tested in labs on animals, but they showed no relevant results to connect cosmetics to cancer, or so they claim. Any way, think about the fact that all make-up products are applied directly on skin and this way they are absorbed more quickly and the rest - like sprays and perfumes - are inhaled, so you’d better think twice when you buy these products.

Here is a list with some ingredients that are known or suspected to be carcinogen and that you should to avoid when buying some make-up products: Diethanolamine, Formaldehyde, Parabens, Petrolatum, Phenyledediamine, Phthalates, Sodium lauryl/laureth sulfate, Talc, Toluene, Triclosan. Of course there’s more to add on this list, but these are the ones proven to do you harm.

So my advice for all of you who use make-up products regularly and will continue to do so with all the risks involved is to buy those products that have the shortest list of ingredients and the shortest period of availability. Or maybe it would be a good idea to try and use only natural products like you were back in Cleopatra’s time when women used milk and noney to make them beautiful.

The thyroid is a gland that is situated at the base of the neck, right under the Adam’s apple. It is shaped like a butterfly and has two lobes. Normally you can’t feel it under the skin when it is healthy, but sometimes there are some abnormal cell formations that feel like a hard lump under the skin. That is a sign that something is wrong and usually a signal of a tumour. Not all lumps are tumours and not all tumour in that area are cancers, but there is still a possibility. That is why it is better to be aware of other symptoms that may be signs of thyroid cancer .
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Just like in the case of all forms of cancer it is better to detect it in the earlier stages because the chances to be cured are higher. Any way this thyropid cancer is pretty rare, as only one percent of the total cancers are thyroid ones. The best thing about this thyroid cancer is the fact that it is highly curable and the chances of totally removing it are pretty high. Also the chances of recurrence in this type of cancer are considerably reduced when compared with other cancers which are a lot more aggressive.

Besides the smaller or bigger lumps that you feel on or around your thyroid, there are also other different thyroid cancer symptoms.

- The enlargement of the neck is one of these symptoms. If you take a look in the mirror you will notice that your neck seems to be a bit wider than usual. This means an abnormal functioning of the thyroid, not necessarily cancer, but sure an alarming signal.

- Since there is something wrong with a gland there will be some enlarged lymph nodes in the area, so try to feel the neck area when the first sign of disease settle on.

- Because the thyroid is placed near the throat, any change in its mass will affect your speach, so another symptom might be the voice changes, the fact that you find it difficult to speak normally and your voice sounds hoarse.

- The tumour affects one of the thyroid’s lobes usually, very rarely both of them. So when it starts growing, it will press on your throat, causing difficulties in breathing and swallowing and giving you a feeling that you are choking all the time.

- As your neck area gets larger - as the tumout grows and the cancer progresses from one stage to another, you will feel pain in the neck or throat, going all the way to your ears. You may also experience an extra sensitivity in the neck area, finding it difficult to wear any clothes that stay tight around your neck like neckties, turtleneck sweaters, scarfs and other similar objects.

- A relevant symptom is the permanent and persistent coughing, even if you are not alergic to anything or you are not having a cold. So when you notice a long dry cough with no apparent reason, you should go see a doctor and find out the cause.
- Just like in the case of other forms of cancer self palpation is one of the most effective ways of finding the tumours that are shown at the outside of your body. So if you will feel the whole area you might find some nodules that seem to move together with the whole thyroid gland or sometimes you may feel a bigger lobe of the thyroid.

Of course these symptoms can be noticed, or at least some of them, but they are usually attributed to other diseases. So if you want to know for sure what is the cause of your illness, you have to do further investigations and the final answer will be a biopsy.

The worst thing about cancer is not that it appears - it’s the fact that it appears by accident and then is transmitted genetically, so it’s not enough that one person gets sick and has to fight with this terrible disease, but they also pass it to the next generations. So, if you come to think of it, you can only assume that cancer numbers will increase in the future. And we can only hope that science and medicine will evolve so much and will be able to find a cure for cancer, for all forms of cancer , so that people will have more chances to survive it.
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But it’s not so easy to do this. First of all the scientists and doctors involved in researches about cancer need a lot of money to do their clinical trials and to buy the advanced equipment that will allow them to make more experiments and get quicker and better results. And even if it sounds awful they don’t always have the money they need for a fair fight against cancer, especially breast cancer, which is the most common form of cancer, affecting more and more women.

That is exactly why many people that support breast cancer victims and fight against it raise funds and try all the possible methods that allow them to get more money invested in this field. The numerous organizations that fight cancer or support people with breast cancer sell different objects in their attempt to gather the necessary funds.

This way they have the possibility to use their abilities and actually do something with them , so they make jewels like breast cancer bracelets and then sell them. Some of these bracelets are hand made and some are made by a producer who agreed to give a big percentage of the money obtained from selling the products to the breast cancer organizations or funds.

Let’s take the pinksilicone breast cancer bracelets presented in the first picture. They are sold for only $2 and support the Breast MRI of Orange County. Obviously, they are not hand made, but they are nice and pink - the colour symbolizing the fight against breast cancer. When you buy such a bracelet you get your small contribution to such a fund that uses money to the fight against cancer and also show your support for these people by wearing the bracelet in the future.

The second picture shows an incredibly beautiful breast cancer bracelet, made of pink quartz and garnet, having a little pink ribbon attached to it. It is a very nice piece of jewellery and at the same time it is very elegant . You can wear it on every occasion together with a nice dress or wearing casual clothes. You can order it here for $18 and you can be sure the money will be well spent.

Now people having this disease can only fight as much as they can, but there is no universal cure for cancer and even if you are healed for the moment, you do not have the certainty that the disease will not come back after some time. So the best thing we can do is to help these organizations supporting the research and experiments that must be done for this and hope that our children will benefit from the results.

They say that life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans. Well, I think it’s true. We all make plans every day and we know exactly what we want to become and we have an agenga that says: I get married when I am 25, I buy a house and a car before 30, I have a baby when I am 35 and so on. But these plans do not include the unexpected, the things that seem to come out of nowhere and turn your whole existence upside down.
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I am talking about many women who made similar plans and were on schedule and got pregnant after succeeding in their carreers and buying a house and a car, so usually after their 35th birthday. And when they are so happy they will become mothers they find out they have breast cancer. So the next logical question to ask is :”Does breast cancer affect pregnancy?”. Let’s try to find out the answer together by studying the facts.

Presently the incidence of breast cancer in pregnant women is about 1% and growing. This is due to the fact that more and more women decide to become mothers for the first time at a later point in life, usually after 30, even 35. The problem is that breast cancer risk increases with age. So there are a lot of pregnant women who can also have breast cancer at the same time.

It is a very serious matter because if the woman is pregnant the signs of having breast cancer can be misleading and attributed to pregnancy so it is very likely to delay the point when the disease is discovered and this affects the possibility to get cured. When carrying a baby , your breasts become bigger and more dense and the lumps signaling breast cancer are a lot more difficult to identify. The big hormone changes in the body during this period are not helping either, as progesterone is helping tumors to develop and get bigger. So usually if the woman is pregnant the cancer in her breast is discovered in the later stages and is more difficult to treat.

Then there are a lot of things to consider and risks to be measured. Radiation and chemotherapy may affect the fetus and cause malformations and an earlier delivery and God knows what other disastruous effects. So many doctors recommend the termination of pregnancy when the woman finds out she has breast cancer. This does not increase her chances of getting cured, but eliminate the possibility of having a baby with health problems. Besides, if there are no restrictions for treatment, the woman can be treated more aggressively and can fight the disease at a more alert pace.

However, there is also the possibility to be sick and still keep the baby. Just have the cancer tissue removed from the body and postpone radiotherapy and chemotherapy until after the baby is born. But all these must be discussed with the doctor and be decided after a thorough documentation and depend a lot on the state of health of the mother, the development of the fetus, the stage of cancer and a lot of other factors.I have to inform you that there haven’t been many studies made on this topic, so the exact consequences are not known very well.

In conclusion, breast cancer does affect pregnancy but not directly. The pregnancy is influenced by the decisions taken as a consequency of having this terrible disease.

Thyroid cancer is not that agressive and deadly as the other types of cancer and is treated a lot more easily and comfortably for the patient. First of all only 5% of the tumours discovered on the thyroid are malignant, which is a very small percentage when compared with cancer developed on other organs. So most patients that suffer from this disease and follow the right thyroid cancer treatment will cure and recover very well, with little consequences over their future life.
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Most patients suffering from thyroid cancer undergo surgery as part of the treatment. The doctors remove a part of the thyroid or all of it, depending on the stage of the disease when it was discovered and also on the severity of the illness. Because the thyroid is only a small organ situated in the throat area of a person, the surgery is minimally invasive and the scar will be very small.When the surgery removes the whole thyroid it is called total thyroidectomy and it can also remove the lymph nodes around the thyroid during the same surgical procedure, if the doctor finds any cancer cells in these lymph nodes.

Sometimes the patients undergoing this surgery will have to follow radioactive iodine treatment and external radiation therapy, too, in order to provide the best results possible. The thyroid is shaped like a butterfly, with two lobes on the sides and when only one lobe is affected the patient will have a lobectomy, that is only the sick lobe will be removed.

If the surgery removed all the sick tissue, the patient will recover successfully and lead an almost normal life in the future. The only problem might be if the thyroid is completely removed, because in this case the patient will have to take a pill every day because we can’t live and be healthy without the hormone that is produced by thyroid, so you will have to replace it with medication. But I don’t see it as a major inconvenient.

Besides surgery there are three more standard types of treatment used in thyroid cancer. The next one is radiation therapy, which includes radioactive iodine therapy. It uses x-rays or another type of radiation to kill the cancer cells and also to prevent them from growing and spreading. There is the external radiation therapy which uses a machine to direct radiation towards the sick tissue and internal radiation therapy that uses a radioactive liquid substance that the doctors introduce directly in the tumour with the help of needles and seringes. This type of treatment is often used in addition to surgery to remove any sick cancer clls that might have remained after surgery. This is a very effective and accurate method as the radioactive iodine used only affects the thyroid cells and distrys them , leaving the tissue around unharmed.

The third type of treatment is called chemotherapy because it uses chemicals - drugs - for killing the sick cells or stopping them from growing and spreading around the body. It can be local , applied directly to the sick organ or injected in the blood stream or taken as pills that end up in the stomach and again in the blood stream that takes the active substance in the whole body. Only the doctors that take care of each case can decide what kind of chemotherapy to use and also the qualntity of drug that is necessary, according to the patients response and the stage of the disease.

The last type of thyroid cancer treatment is thyroid hormone therapy that I mentioned above and which supplies the human body with the necessary quantity of thyrois hormone.

But researches are made as we speak about all kinds of cancer and the ways they must be treated best, so there may be some other methods that will be used soon.

Testicular cancer is cancer of the testicle and is a rare form of cancer. Statistics have shown that it seems to appear more frequently in Caucasians and less in such parts of the world like Asia and Africa. The highest numbers of cases of testicular cancer appear in Scandinavia , Germany and New Zealand and numbers have increased after 1960.  It has a greater incidence in the case of men in their twenties because in this period the sexual life is the most active. The good news about this disease is the fact that it is almost always curable, having a survival rate of over 95%. The most important risk factor that leads to the development of this disease in the testis is when the testicles are undescended. This is explained by the fact that when testicles are undescended and a tumour appears, it will have more place where to develop and spread. Some other risk factors are considered a static lifestyle, inguinal hernia and mumps orchitis and also an early development of male characteristics.
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This disease is highly curable , especially if it is discovered in the early stage, so specialists recommend a systematic palpation of the testis - better done after a hot shower because this relaxes the scrotum and you can feel any lump or unusual formation easier. Besides the obvious symptom of detecting an abnormal excrescence on one of the testicles, there may be other signs that can suggest testicle cancer: the scrotum and testis have a sudden change in sensitivity and the area either becomes painful or on the contrary you can’t feel anything there, you lose the sexual appetite out of a sudden, experience a burning sensation in the area after you perform some kind of physical activity, your scrotum seems filled with a lot of liquid, you feel a sore in the lower abdomen and the lombar area , you get tired easily or may have blood in the semen.

The exact diagnosis is established by doctors after having an ultrasound and also other tests and the patient is recommended to follow a specific treatment . Usually the cancer cells that appear as lumps on the surface of the testis are removed surgically and usually this is a success and the risk of having a recurrence of the disease is also limited by the radiotherapy and chemotherapy that are used in addition to surgery in order to make sure that all cancer cells are distroyed or removed from the body.



The surgical removal of the infected testicle is called orchiectomy and they usually only remove one testicle, so this way the patient will be able to have children and a normal life. There are very few cases when the remaining testicle gets infected, too. When the cancer is spread to the lymph nodes surrounding the testis and the genital area, these nodes are also surgically removed to avoid any risk. The testicle cancer can be fatal only if it is discovered very late and it has already spread to liver and lungs but even in these cases, if all the metastases are removed, the patient still has a good chance of survival.