News digest – breast cancer guidelines, spending plans, liver cancer tummy bugs and more - Cancer Research UK

“This is the news”

The big news this week was updated NICE guidance on treating healthy women at high risk of breast cancer, including offering genetic testing more widely, and prescribing drugs like tamoxifen to women in this category. Here’s our take on the story.

Many said the announcement was a ‘game changer’, and it was certainly great to see as it follows decades of hard work by our researchers – they helped pin down the faulty BCRA genes, and also proved the effectiveness of tamoxifen on lowering risk.

One of these researchers, Professor Jack Cuzick, wrote this thoughtful piece in The Conversation about the regulatory barriers to wide use of tamoxifen use by doctors.

But as this article in the Daily Mail made clear, these are drugs that can cause significant side-effects – most notably menopause-like symptoms, but also a small increased risk of blood clots and womb cancer.

The other big story this week was the Government’s announcement of its spending plans for 2015/16. Among the continued cuts, there was good news for research spending – here’s our reaction.

Back in the lab, Cancer Research UK researchers in London are making progress in understanding how melanoma spreads – here’s our press release

And we blogged about intriguing research from Japan looking at the links between obesity, liver cancer and the bacteria in our guts.

A new analysis of GP data suggests that there are significant delays in diagnosing kidney and bladder cancers, particularly in women. We covered it on our newsfeed.

Similarly, a new audit of gastric and oesophageal cancer diagnosis also found significant delays, as the Huffington Post reports.

The Guardian published a great blog post by researcher Cath Ennis, looking at the impact gene-sequencing is having on understanding and treating cancer.

The Telegraph carried this powerful and moving account of a parent’s experience of childhood cancer trials.

A new analysis we helped fund showed a six-fold increase in cure rates for teenagers and young adults with acute myeloid leukaemia. The Daily Mail was one of several newspapers to cover the story.

We spotted this in-depth feature article in TIME magazine, looking at progress in targeted treatments

Several media outlets covered a study purporting to find that fish oils reduce the risk of breast cancer. We’re not convinced by the findings – some of the results weren’t statistically robust, and, as far as we’re concerned, the jury’s still out.

You may have spotted a viral video doing the rounds, claiming that doctors “injected a dying girl with HIV” to try to cure her. We’re all for inspiring science – which this certainly is. The only problem, as we pointed out in this blog post, is that doctors didn’t actually inject her with HIV – it’s a bit more complex (and interesting) than that. Happily, our post went a bit viral too – and the video now has a clarification and a link to our piece. Job done.

Henry

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