Category: cancer

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In Honor of Movember, Here Are 15 Epic Moustaches

Each November, men all over the world grow moustaches for Movember, a nonprofit organization that raises awareness for men’s health issues such as testicular cancer, prostate cancer, and mental health.

Their goal: to stop men dying too young.

In honor of Movember, let’s take a look at some pretty impressive cookie dusters.

1. Solid and timeless.

2. Black and white action.

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Perfect moustache day •

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3. A young Bill Murray. Legend.

4. This fella is not messing around.

5. Kind of terrifying, TBH.

6. Damn right it’s epic.

7. A little Rollie Fingers action.

8. I want to meet this guy.

9. A sharp looking ‘stache.

10. This man is a legend.

Do you have a killer ‘stache that you want to show off?

Maybe you’re even growing one for Movember?

Share your pics in the comments!

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Ex-NFL Player Deangelo Williams Paid for 500 Mammograms to Honor His Mother Who Died from Breast Cancer

DeAngelo Williams retired from professional football a few years ago, but, by the looks of it, his work might just be getting started. The former running back for the Carolina Panthers and the Pittsburgh Steelers made news recently when he paid for 500 mammograms for women through his non-profit organization, the DeAngelo Williams Foundation.

Williams’ mother passed away five years ago from breast cancer, and since then the ex-NFL player has made it his mission to help women with mammogram screenings and other tests so they can hopefully catch any potential issues as early as possible.

Sandra Hill, Williams’ mother, was only 53 years old when she passed away in 2014. Williams also lost four of his aunts to breast cancer, all before they had reached 50 years of age. So for him, this work if incredibly important.

So far, Williams’ foundation has paid for 500 mammograms for women in Pittsburgh, Charlotte, Memphis, and Jonesboro, Arkansas. He said, “To be able to help all these women is amazing. This can be life-changing for these women. We are enabling them to get this care that no one should ever be denied or not have access to.”

Even though Williams has already done an amazing amount of work, he’s aiming much higher. He wants to host free mammogram screenings in all 50 states and expand the reach of his organization as far as is humanly possible.

Risalyn Williams, his wife and executive director of the foundation, said, “DeAngelo wants to ensure that no woman (or man) fights breast cancer alone.”

Keep up the excellent work, Mr. Williams!

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A Breast Cancer Vaccine Might Be Available in Less Than 10 Years

No matter who you are, you’ve likely known someone who’s been impacted by breast cancer.

That’s why this news from the world-renowned Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, is potentially so groundbreaking. The institution recently announced that a vaccine that could stop the recurrence of breast and ovarian cancer, that could even stop them from developing in the first place, may be available within eight years.

The vaccine is in the early stages of development, and it would be at least three years before it was available to large numbers of patients. Mayo Clinic investigator Keith L. Knutson said, “It is reasonable to say that we could have a vaccine within eight years that may be available to patients through their pharmacy or their doctor.”

Staff at the clinic already have two vaccines against breast cancer, and they’re currently worked on the third one. This latest vaccine is intended to fight DCIS, ductal carcinoma in situ, a non-invasive breast cancer that appears in 300,000 new cases each year.

Knutson added, “We know that they’re safe. We know that they stimulate the immune system [to fight cancer]. We know that they have had a positive impact on ovarian and breast cancer. We haven’t seen any adverse events that are causing problems other than irritation in the area similar to a flu vaccination. Now we have to convince the FDA, through solid, rigorous clinical trials that we’re seeing what we’re seeing.”

This “Phase 3″ clinical trial could potentially cost millions of dollars to carry out, which is why the process takes years. The vaccines the clinic is working on are intended to boost the body’s immune system and kill cancer cells. Knutson said, “If you develop a cold or something like that, you do develop an immune response, and that actually doesn’t necessarily prevent the disease, but it keeps it at bay and it helps clear it.”

Knutson added that the Mayo Clinic is working on the foundation they’ve already established to attempt to further develop their cancer-fighting vaccines. This may be a few years away, but it gives hope, both to women currently fighting cancer and to those who fear developing it in the future.

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After Almost Losing His Mother, This Teen Invented a Bra That Can Detect Breast Cancer Early

I bet we’ll be hearing from this young man for many years.

After Julián Ríos Cantú watched his mother endure two bouts with breast cancer, the 18-year-old from Mexico decided he wanted to help out other women who might not have access to affordable healthcare.

Posted by Julián Ríos Cantú on Monday, November 20, 2017

Cantú’s mother ended up having a mastectomy. Standard screenings missed the lumps in his mother’s breasts because her high breast density obscured the growths. Cantú said, “At that moment, I realized that if that was the case for a woman with private insurance and a prevention mindset, then for most women in developing countries, like Mexico where we’re from, the outcome could’ve not been a mastectomy but death.”

Cantú took matters into his own hands, inventing Eva, a “bio-sensing bra insert” that uses thermal sensing and artificial intelligence to create a thermal map of women’s breasts. Abnormal temperatures and tumor growth are related, and an Eva insert can help women detect cancerous growths. It also helps with the self-examination process.

As things stand today, patients don’t have a lot of options for early detection of breast cancer. If you’re under 45, you can’t receive mammograms due to concerns about exposure to radiation. Even if you’re over that age, mammograms can be very expensive.

The Eva technology does not emit any radiation, and women of all ages can wear the insert.

The company has performed clinical trials on more than 2,000 women in Mexico. Eva’s website says,

“Eva’s technology is approved by the FDA as an adjunct method for breast cancer detection in section 884.2980 Teletermographic Systems. Similarly, Eva Clinic operates under the highest ethical standards, strictly following the Official Mexican Standard NOM-041-SSA2-2011, for the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, control, and surveillance of breast cancer.”

The product is now available for use at certified Eva clinics, but who knows? Maybe someday it’ll be in our houses, helping women detect breast cancer even earlier.

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In 2013, Australian blogger Belle Gibson…

In 2013, Australian blogger Belle Gibson claimed to have beaten brain cancer using ‘natural remedies’ — selling a cookbook to cancer patients with all her ‘secrets’. It was later revealed she never even had cancer, and was fined $410,000 by the Australian government for her deceptive practices.

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13 Game-Changing Scientific Discoveries Everyone Needs To Know About

I fucking love science. Because science can help us create things that seem like magic, but they’re real and they usually help humanity.

Recently a reddit thread asked the following question: What are some recent scientific breakthroughs/discoveries that aren’t getting enough attention? Of course, reddit users didn’t disappoint with their knowledge of all those things we haven’t heard about, but need to.

So check out these 13 discoveries and have faith in science. Because it’s provable and actually helps us all.

Amen.

1. Carbon Dioxide Flakes?

That we have figured out how to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and now, very recently, how to turn it into solid flakes of carbon again. And not just under higly specific and expensive lab conditions, this process is apparently scalable.

We still need to curb emissions but this does flip the equation quite a bit regarding global warming, allowing us to put some of the toothpaste back into the tube so to speak.

Coupled with wind and solar energy, I predict this will become a major industry by mid-century, and very pure carbon an abundant material.

2. New killer whales?

Don’t know if anyone has pointed this one out… but pretty certain scientists have discovered a new species of orcas that live in sub-Antarctic waters.

They are calling it the “Type-D Orca”… pretty cool looking animals.

More rounded heads… smaller white eye patches… taller, narrower dorsal fins…

Being a soon to be marine biology grad, this excites me!

3. MDMA helping PTSD?

If the final trials go well (they are predicted to and the previous trials have done), MDMA-assisted psychotherapy will soon be an FDA-approved treatment for PTSD.

It is administered in a couple of doses over a few weeks and has lifelong effects.

The group doing this research got FDA Breakthrough Therapy status for it a few years ago and have been carrying out the phase 3 trials since early last year.

They were doing research into the same thing in Israel and it just got approved for compassionate use for PTSD in Israel this month.

Organization is called MAPS and they do some really interesting work.

4. Gluten-free?

There’s a good chance there will be a cure for celiac disease within the next 10 years.

There’s currently an active and ongoing clinical trial where participants (with diagnosed celiac) are getting infusions that will ultimately reverse the autoimmune response a person with celiac has when they consume gluten. It’s still far from complete, but we are closer than we’ve ever been to curing celiac disease.

**The clinical trial is taking place in Cleveland, Ohio. I was asked to be a part of it but unfortunately I just don’t have the extra time. If anybody local wants more information please message me and I can get you in contact with one of the researchers!

5. Skin guns?

Pretty recently they started doing tests for an extremely mobile skin grafting machine. It uses a kind of hydrogel out of the patient’s own skin, and scans the area of the burn then just prints out the skin.

Also, I saw a video a while ago about a guy who had a solution of skin cells airbrushed on the burn (mostly 2nd degree, IIRC). In 3-4 days he was healed with no scarring. The skin gun: https://youtu.be/eXO_ApjKPaI

6. Chemo that doesn’t poison you?

My job is coming came out with a drug that reduces the damage chemotherapy does to the body and helps regenerate blood cells faster, allowing for stronger doses to be administered and treatment scheduled to be reduced heavily.

This allows doctors to treat cancer more aggressively.

7. Bionic parts?

You can get hands and feet that are pretty close to the actual thing that operate by feeling the muscles that remain.

We will soon be long gone from the days of military style hooks and lumps of solid plastic.

8. Mental health issues caused by inflammation?

One of the more recent theories in psychiatry gaining popularity (although it was acknowledged decades ago) is the role of inflammation and the immune system in mental illness. There are studies showing that in schizophrenia and other psychotic conditions, inflammation attacks the brain. Some of the damage by inflammation might be irreversible, so the hope is that early intervention could prevent chronic schizophrenia. Trials have been attempted with anti-inflammatories like fish oil, with mixed success.

The role of inflammation has been extended to multiple mental illnesses, like depression, with raised inflammatory markers and other evidence being a common finding. Ultimately mental illness is multifactorial, and the causes are often biological, psychological, and/or social. So we can’t reduce something so complex and heterogenous to just an action by the immune system. But it has gained some excitement in the field because there could be people out there, for example, with schizophrenia for whom one of the primary causes is immune system dysregulation, and researchers are racing to find a prevention.

9. Diabetes no more?

They’re getting closer to a cure for type 1 diabetes. There’s already multiple people who have been cured with no need for insulin for years now after a clinical study

Here is the man that’s been cured: https://www.cityofhope.org/breakthroughs/rose-parade-diabetes-patient-roger-sparks

Here is a good breakdown of what they found in 2018: https://www.cityofhope.org/breakthroughs/wanek-project-to-cure-type-1-diabetes-18-months-later

And this is the latest new on the study: https://www.cityofhope.org/breakthroughs/study-by-diabetes-expert-describes-promising-type-1-treatments

10. New physics?!

Astronomer here!

Most of you have heard that the universe is expanding. Astrophysicists believe there is a relationship between the distance to faraway galaxies and how fast they are moving from us, called the Hubble constant.

We use the Hubble constant for… just about everything in cosmology, to be honest. This isn’t crazy and has been accepted for many decades.

What is crazy is, if you are paying attention, it appears the Hubble constant is different depending on what you use to measure it!

Specifically, if you use the “standard candle” stars (Cepheids and Type Ia supernovae) to measure how fast galaxies are speeding away from us, you get ~73 +/- 1 km/s/Mpc.

If you study the earliest radiation from the universe (the Cosmic Microwave Background) using the Planck satellite, you get 67 +/- 1 km/s/Mpc. This is a LOT, and both methods have a lot of confidence in that measurement with no obvious errors.

To date, no one has come up with a satisfactory answer for why this might be, and in the past year or so it’s actually a bit concerning. If they truly disagree, well, it frankly means there is some new, basic physics at play.

Exciting stuff! It’s just so neat that whenever you think you know how the universe works, it can throw these new curveballs at you from the most unexpected places!

11. Glad + Metal = ?!

Earlier this month, scientists were able to successfully weld glass and metal together using ultrafast (on the order of picoseconds, which are such a short unit of time that compared to it, a full second might as well be 30,000 years) laser pulses.

This hasn’t been successfully done before due to the very different thermal properties of glass and metal.

This is actually a pretty big breakthrough in manufacturing and could lead to stronger yet lighter materials.

12. Special K treats depression?

The FDA just approved ketamine as an antidepressant for treatment-resistant depression in the form of esketamine as a nasal spray.

It’s of the few unique and hopeful approaches to treatment-resistant depression that we’ve seen in years—some stats put the rate of recovery as high as 80%.

This doesn’t give you full recovery, but alleviation at least.

13. We’re still discovering lost history?

Göbekli Tepe – ruin discovered in Turkey that dates back to 11000 BCE, or further.

This throws a massive wrench into our understanding of what people were capable of at that time, and hints at advanced civilizations having likely existed long before we thought they did.

It has also only been about 10% excavated.

Also…

I’ve actually read some articles over the past few weeks about archaeologists using LIDAR technology to uncover Mayan ruins, and they’ve found that Mayan civilization was much more extensive than originally assumed.

At its height, its now believed that its population may have numbered near 15 million citizens, and that they engaged in extensive trade with their neighbors to the North and South; these LIDAR scans have revealed evidence of vast cities, farmlands and roadways. And this was all without any pack animals or wheeled carts.

Well, look at what science keeps doing for us!

Believe in science, folks. It always comes through eventually.

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U.S. flight attendants have higher…

U.S. flight attendants have higher rates of breast cancer, uterine cancer, gastrointestinal cancer, thyroid cancer, and cervical cancer, when compared with the general public, likely due to regular exposure to cosmic ionizing radiation.

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18-Year-Old Beauty Queen Speaks up Against UV Light Manicures After Getting Cancer From Them

When she was only 18, future Miss Illinois Karolina Jasko found out she had melanoma. It’s likely that she’d never have noticed it on her own, and was only alerted to it when her nail technician spotted a vertical black line on her right thumbnail

Photo Credit: Instagram

Karolina had gotten her nails done regularly since she was a freshman in high school, and even though Karolina’s doctors say the cause of her melanoma was most likely genetic, they do agree that the consistent UV rays from her gel manicures could have sped up the onset of the disease.

“I experienced a lot of different feelings when I got my diagnosis,” she told Buzzfeed. “I was scared, but also confused. I didn’t think that this could happen to me, so I was in a little bit of shock.”

The high school senior was suddenly faced with a cancer diagnosis, surgery, and the possibility that she might be living the rest of her life with only one thumb.

“Luckily, they were able to just remove my whole nail matrix. I don’t have a nail on that thumb and never will, due to them removing the matrix.”

Like any girl her age staring down a life-altering illness, she felt self-conscious about always looking different from her peers – she was left with scars on her groin, chest, back, and arm (in addition to her thumb).

Photo Credit: Instagram

“I was embarrassed because I thought people noticed them, and it was something to be ashamed of, especially the thumb. I wore a band-aid every time I was in public for the first year after it healed because of how scared I was of someone asking me or being grossed out by it.”

Stepping into her role as Miss Illinois changed all of that, giving her more self-confidence and validating that she’s still beautiful and has important things to say.

“Once I started to feel more comfortable in my role as Miss Illinois, and from speaking to my directors and everyone involved in my life, I realized I was granted an incredible opportunity.”

Photo Credit: Instagram

She’s using her platform to spread awareness about the dangers of UV rays and melanoma. Karolina also doesn’t want other girls to struggle the way she did, regardless of what they look like.

“I also wanted to show girls that they need to be confident in their own skin and with their imperfections. I was able to become Miss Illinois and compete on the Miss USA stage with mine.”

She wants girls to know that they’re perfect the way they are – and also that they should regularly see a dermatologist. Just in case.

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Study Finds Cancer Is Much More Likely to Kill Those Who Rely on ‘Natural’ Therapies

When it comes to natural medicines and therapies, I’ve always been a bit wary. While I’ve had a few instances where a natural remedy might have helped me feel better, I’m certainly not about to throw good ol’ science-based medicine out the window!

The news isn’t great for natural remedies these days. While mainstream medicine (and the health care system in the U.S.) has a LONG way to go, it’s still the best way to get treated – and that’s backed up by research. A study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute states that cancer patients are twice as likely to die from their cancer if they choose natural remedies over regular medicine. And if you have breast or colorectal cancer, you’re FIVE TIMES more likely to die if you choose alternative medicine.

Photo Credit: Pixnio

To be clear, these statistics do not reflect people who use alternative medicine along with traditional treatment.

The research shows that natural treatments do not address the actual problem when it comes to cancer. Your body likely won’t recognize the problem when cancer cells are growing because the cancer isn’t trying to kill, the cells are trying to multiply.

Bottom line: modern medicine isn’t perfect, but it is your best bet. Cancer treatments are harsh and invasive, but your chances of living longer are greatly improved if you take advantage of them. And more people are living with cancer today than ever before.

Cancer is a grim subject, but there is absolutely room for hope!

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This Chart Shows How Your Lifestyle Can Affect Your Cancer Risk

We all know that the healthier our lifestyle, the more our likelihood of getting cancer goes down. But there is so much news about so many different cancer risk factors that it’s hard to block out the noise and get the facts.

How do cell phones, different foods, coffee, exercise, etc. affect our likelihood of getting cancer? The World Cancer Research Fund gathered all the latest research data and has provided all of us with an interactive chart that allows you to see how different lifestyle choices affect cancer. You can play around with the full version by clicking HERE.

Take some time to play around with the interactive chart and maybe you’ll be inspired to change some of the habits you have that could lead to a healthier lifestyle.

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