News digest – hormone replacement therapy, cancer screening, ‘breath-sniffing’ smartphone app and more

• Ovarian cancer is slightly more common among women who take hormone replacement therapy (HRT) even for short amounts of time, according to the largest analysis of the subject to date. This attracted a huge amount of media coverage.
• Our scientists found that nine in 10 people think that cancer screening is ‘almost always a good idea’, despite the fact that a far lower proportion actually attend screening when invited. But people were also much less knowledgeable about the risks of screening. Here’s the press release, and one of the research team wrote this article for The Conversation.
• The same team also found that having a cancer ‘false alarm’ could put people off visiting their doctor about cancer symptoms they develop in the future. The Mirror covered this, here’s our press release, and the researchers wrote about it on their blog.
• Smoking in cars carrying children will become illegal in England later this year following an MP vote in Parliament. Here’s the BBC’s report.
• A so-called ‘breath test’ for lung cancer, that uses a machine to try to detect chemicals given off by cancer cells, will be tested in an early-stage clinical trial. Sky News has more on this.
• Research on a group of rare bone marrow disorders found that the timing in which certain errors occur in a cell’s DNA may ultimately determine how different cancers behave.
• US scientists identified a potentially important escape mechanism that may help tumours dodge certain targeted drugs.
• This excellent BBC Panorama programme follows a group of patients having treatment with the latest cancer therapies, through clinical trials.
• For terminal cancer patients and their families, making end-of-life decisions is really important. And new research has looked at the potential warning signs that could indicate impending death. Forbes has more on this tough subject.
• Reuters ran this article looking at how people running clinical trials monitor side effects experienced by patients.
• This article from NPR explores the hot topic of cancer immunotherapy (including a nice animated example of how some of these immune-boosting therapies work).
• Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, made some unfortunate remarks while pitching what he sees as some of the potential health benefits of the tech giant’s smartwatch.
• Early stage trials in the US showed that a new probe that uses laser light to detect cancer cells was able to distinguish between brain tumour cells and normal brain tissue during surgery. News Medical has more on this.

And finally

• Following reports on the lung cancer ‘breathalyser’, the Metro had this rather far-fetched article about a smartphone app that can ‘sniff out’ cancer for you. But this device and app don’t actually exist yet – so this PR-driven vision of the future is a rather long way off appearing in an app store near you.

Nick

Image

• Phone image from Flickr, under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0