How to use this Page

By Lauren Pecorino

There is a tendency to complain about policies when writing blogs, but I think it is time to commend the British campaigns and innovations in treatment. They have proven to be some of the best in the world and have had a major impact in the fight against cancer.

One of the best British campaigns is against cervical cancer. Getting personally posted invitations to attend your next PAP screening, supported by pamphlets of information, is something few women ignore. Those who try to ignore these invitations are rightly and relentlessly bombarded with regular reminders.

And, with the knowledge that a sexually transmitted virus, Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), is responsible for all cases of cervical cancer, the UK implemented a national school-based HPV vaccination programme that has proven to yield high uptake. By 2009, 70 percent of 12-13 year olds in the UK were fully vaccinated. These results are admirable compared to the results of alternative on-demand provisions offered by other countries including the USA. Note that the vaccine is recommended for early teens as it is a preventative vaccine and not a therapeutic vaccine, and must be administered before the initiation of sexual activity for it to be effective. The vaccine prevents about 70% of cervical cancers caused by two specific strains of HPV. PAP screening is still important to catch cases that are not prevented by the vaccine. An added bonus of this campaign is that the same vaccine also protects against some head, neck, and anal cancers caused by HPV infections.

Another great British effort is towards the prevention of lung cancer. The anti-smoking adverts have been haunting, especially the most recent one released by the UK Department of Health that shows a tumor growing on a cigarette. It is brilliant. I wish I had designed it. The advert strikingly conveys the message that if you saw the damage smoking causes, you would not smoke. The percentage of male cigarette smokers have fallen from 55% in 1970 to 21% in 2010 and a decreasing number of deaths due to lung cancer has followed this trend.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The UK is also a model of good practice in that it is the only country in the world which has a network of free ‘stop-smoking’ services, recently supported by specialized training for National Health Service Stop Smoking practitioners.

We can help the national campaign at a personal level by being more opinionated and outspoken when it comes to letting those around us know that smoking is harmful and “uncool”- especially among the young. We must ensure the message is passed down to new generations.

Finally, the UK is at the leading edge in using stem cells to help replace organs damaged by cancer. Tracheal transplants using tracheal scaffolds from cadavers seeded with the patient’s own stem cells have been used to replace damaged tissue for patients with tracheal cancer. Currently scientists at University College London are developing very similar procedures to grow a new nose for a patient who had lost their nose to cancer. These innovative approaches are the result of a continuously open, well-supported but regulated stem cell research policy, not yet seen in the USA.

Well done Great Britain!

Lauren Pecorino received her PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in Cell and Developmental Biology. She crossed the Atlantic to carry out a postdoctoral tenure at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, London. She is a Principal Lecturer at the University of Greenwich where teaches Cancer Biology and Therapeutics. The teaching of this course motivated her to write The Molecular Biology of Cancer: Mechanisms, Targets, and Therapeutics, now in its second edition. Feedback on the textbook posted on Amazon from a cancer patient drove her to write a book on cancer for a wider audience: Why Millions Survive Cancer: the Successes of Science.

Read a World Cancer Day Q&A with Lauren Pecorino.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only health and medicine articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post World Cancer Day 2013: The Best of British appeared first on OUPblog.

Bonnie Spring is a Professor of Preventive Medicine, Psychology, and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Director of Behavioral Medicine, and Co-Program Leader for Cancer Prevention at Northwestern University. A Past President of the Society of Behavioral Medicine, she is board-certified in clinical health psychology. Dr. Spring’s most recent book is Smoking Cessation with Weight Gain Prevention, and in the  original post below, she reflects on her own struggle with giving up cigarettes and maintaining her weight.

“You’ve given me new hope.” So read the e-mail that arrived shortly after Parade Magazine published a story about my research showing that trying to manage weight gain while stopping smoking can help rather than hurt successful quitting. A steady stream of similar messages flowed in, taking my mind back to the days when I first started to study weight gain after quitting smoking. I still flinch at the memories. Faculty colleagues asked when I would switch to studying a real health problem – one with serious medical consequences. The reception was about as chilly at the National Institutes of Health. The words of a usually supportive program officer float back to me, “Oh come on…There’s only an average six to eight pound weight gain after quitting. That’s not a health problem – that’s a cosmetic problem. We’re in the business of studying threats to health – not insults to personal vanity!”

The physicians I spoke with weren’t much more helpful. They said things like, “Look, there’s no question that the much greater health risk comes from the smoking rather than the weight gain. The average person would have to gain about 100 pounds to offset the health benefit of quitting.” Indeed, medical practice guidelines conveyed a similar message. The U.S. Public Health Service Guideline on Tobacco Treatment encouraged physicians to tell patients not to worry about weight gain until they were fully confident and secure as non-smokers. The fear was that trying to manage both things at once – smoking and weight – would be overwhelming and would undermine the success of the quit attempt. Yet even though that guidance seemed right-minded and conservative, I watched it prompt my friends to make a life-threatening decision. Nor did I watch detachedly, because I was one of the many smokers who responded by making the same bad decision. Having to choose between being smoke-free and being slender felt like being crushed between a rock and a hard place. Yes, I cared about my long-term health and wanted very badly to quit. However, maintaining a slender, attractive appearance felt essential to sustain the social reinforcers that were vital to my quality of life. We can call it vain, irrational or disordered till the cows come home, but my priorities were certainly not unusual then or now. I continued to smoke.

Living out the truism that “research is me-search,” I began a series of treatment studies to test different ways to help smokers quit smoking without gaining weight. We already knew that ex-smokers gain weight especially because they eat more, but al

humbug: something designed to deceive or mislead; nonsense or drivel

On the second day of 2010, the pressure is on: "Did you make a resolution? Are you keeping it? What's yours?" Such questions fade as the month passes, but for the moment, it's tradition to find one more thing to stress about. As if we needed something else!

This isn't going to be about my resolutions that you could care less about: you've got enough crosses and crutches of your own to bear. What it's about is resolutions that should be tossed into history's trash bin because they're less important than we think or we need to instead find something more meaningful. To begin with--humbug to New Year's resolutions!

Humbug to losing weight

If you're obese or overweight, make out your will. But first find a BMI calculator that understands Chicanos are mostly shorter and stockier than Anglos. Don't go here, because whether I enter I'm Hispanic or Caucasian, it still gives me the same message: "Your BMI is 30.5 - obese."

If you want to lose weight, go here for another book that would be good to read but that you'll forget as soon as you smell the queso-grasa-carne homemade enchiladas Abuela's cooking.

Humbug! If you want to lose weight, stop eating all the good stuff. But remember losing too much will eliminate love handles and, well, you know what those are good for.

Humbug to smoking being addictive

Cigarette companies want us to believe smoking is worse than a habit--that it's addictive. All a smoker's got to do to realize this is humbug is to take a cross-country flight. Sure, when you get to your destination the first thing you do is run to the tarmac or curb to light up. But, fact is, you made it there, and the nicotine DTs were tolerable. Try doing that to a heroin addict and see whether his is "just" a habit.

If you do want to quit, don't follow the advice of Lisa's advice on a quit-smoking commercial: "You're not my crutch. I don't need a crutch." I don't know what planet Lisa lives on, but it's not Earth. Lisa must not have been pink-slipped or downsized, never did a subprime on her house, doesn't have a kid condemned to 20 years of college loan payments, never tried that cross-country flight that a terrorist might also take, doesn't have sobrinos in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Nextistan, and her planet must not be Pluto (if you still call it a planet).

Smoking's not healthy, but it might be less dangerous than Lisa's medicine that carries this Most important safety information:
"If you notice agitation, hostility, depression, or changes in behavior, thinking, or mood atypical for you, or you develop suicidal thoughts or actions, anxiety, panic, aggression, anger, mania, abnormal sensations, hallucinations, paranoia, or confusion, stop taking it. Also depression or other menta