Health Care

Christiene Bowden
http://www.iwearitwell.com

No-lump breast cancer is invasive and highly aggressive form of cancer. Good news, though it is rare.

Inflammatory Breast Cancer does not produce a lump so it can go unnoticed; in fact, it can pass simply as inflammation of the breast, which the doctor may initially prescribe antibiotics for. However, unlike ordinary breast infection that also causes swelling of the breast, Inflammatory Breast Cancer will not respond favorably to antibiotics. It is a form of breast cancer that spreads rapidly; unless detected earlier, survival is very slim.

Suzanne G. Beaver of Camarillo, 47, dismissed her engorged breasts as pre-menstrual syndrome and just got busier at work hoping that her condition would improve. Three weeks later, she was told she had inflammatory breast cancer.

Dr. Tim Moynihan, a cancer specialist at the Mayo Clinic, cited in one of his published articles the typical danger signs of inflammatory breast cancer:

1. The breast can become engorged and tender.

2. Inflammatory Breast Cancer causes the breast to appear red, enlarged and feel warm

to the touch.

3. There is an absence of a lump, but the entire breast would swell.

Mastitis is a breast disease that causes inflammation of the breast and is often accompanied by fever. At the onset, inflammatory breast cancer has the symptoms similar to mastitis that it can be easily considered as such, but unlike mastitis that responds quickly to medication, inflammatory breast cancer is very rarely accompanied by fever and antibiotic treatment may not help.

How bad can it get?

The course of treatment between the common type of breast cancer and the inflammatory type differs. For one, chemotherapy may be started right away among patients suffering from inflammatory breast cancer, prior to removing the diseased breast. This is to allow the skin of the breast to heal first before the operation. With inflammatory type of breast cancer, the skin surrounding the breast can become red and swollen; this makes it difficult for doctors to operate on the breast.

Mastectomy does not guarantee cancer will not recur among women suffering from the inflammatory type. This is primarily the reason why there is a need to put the patient on radiation therapy even if mastectomy has already been performed on the breast. Incidence of recurrence can be high due to the condition of the skin on the breast region.

At the first sign of a rash or inflammation on the local region of the breast, you should take a closer look. The problem may not be as simple as you think!

Sometimes, it is better to worry a bit (without becoming paranoid), than be sorry about it.

Sudden Cardiac Arrest or Sudden Death is the abrupt loss of consciousness, breathing and heartbeat. It kills over 325,000 Americans a year. Thats more than breast cancer, colon cancer and motor vehicle accidents combined. The media frequently uses the more well-known term, massive heart attack, to describe the cause of death when, in actuality, a heart attack is only the death of a part of the heart muscle. Sudden Cardiac Arrest is caused by a heart attack or scaring from a previous heart attack. During cardiac arrest the pacemaker cells in the heart that normally cause the heart to contract and relax in a rhythmic pattern become disorganized and chaotic. This activity is called ventricular fibrillation; the heart is not beating but fibrillates or quivers like a jello mold shaken on a plate. Many victims develop symptoms only moments before their heart stops and some experience the cardiac arrest itself as the first, last and only indication of heart disease.

Sudden Death is potentially reversible but only if the victim receives Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) and is shocked with a Automated External Defibrillator (AED) within a few minutes after collapsing. Performing CPR on a victim moves blood through the body, providing oxygen to the brain and heart, which can prolong the hearts electrical activity. An AED gives a shock of electricity through the heart causing it to contract and stop its erratic fibrillation. This allows the cells in the heart to reset back into a normal beat. Time is the critical factor and can make the difference between life and death. In just four to six minutes permanent brain damage starts to occur and within ten minutes the heart is no longer fibrillating and has degraded to a condition called astoyle, commonly known as a flatline. Although Hollywood often portrays the successful resuscitation of people with a flatline EKG, this does not happen in the real world. Once there is no electrical activity in the heart, the victims chances of survival are almost nonexistent.

There are several models of Automated External Defibrillators available and, although they have minor differences, all of them give instructions that are designed for use by a non-medical professional. The AED will determine if the victim needs a shock and will then guide you through the rescue with verbal cues, pictures or written text. Some models even coach users through the steps of CPR. Public access defibrillators are becoming more widespread and are seen in airports, malls, casinos, health cubs, restaurants, golf courses, public parks, churches and office buildings. More and more people are getting an AED for their home, RV or boat as well.

Reversal of sudden cardiac arrest is possible with immediate notification of emergency medical services (911) and the combination of CPR and defibrillation with an AED in the first few minutes after a victim collapses.

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Linda Woolsey RN, BA is a registered nurse and a Basic Life Support Instructor with the American Heart Association. She is also certified by the American College of Sports Medicine as a Health/Fitness Instructor and has worked extensively with people to improve their medical conditions through nutrition and exercise. For the past seven years she has worked in health and safety, promoting public awareness of automated external defibrillators.

She can be reached at woolseyconsulting@gmail.com

Research on two continents signaled more bad news for menopause hormones, offering the strongest evidence yet that they can raise the risk of breast cancer and are tied to a slightly higher risk of ovarian cancer.

New U.S. government numbers showed that breast cancer rates leveled off in 2004 after plunging in 2003 — the year after millions of women stopped taking hormones because a big study tied them to higher heart, stroke and breast cancer risks. Experts said the leveling off shows that the 2003 drop in the cancer rate was real and not a fluke.

From 2001 to 2004, breast cancer rates fell almost 9 percent — a dramatic decline, researchers report in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. The trend was even stronger for the most common form of the disease — tumors whose growth is fueled by hormones. Those rates fell almost 15 percent among women ages 50 to 69, the group most likely to have been on hormone pills.

At the same time, a study of nearly 1 million women in the United Kingdom showed that those who took hormones after menopause were 20 percent more likely to develop ovarian cancer or die from it than women who never took the pills. That study was published online by the London-based journal The Lancet.

For consumers, the new research doesn't change the advice to use the lowest dose for the shortest time possible for hot flashes and other menopause symptoms that can't otherwise be controlled.

For cautious scientists, the new breast cancer numbers were more evidence of the hormone-breast cancer link.

"The story has gotten stronger," said Dr. Peter Ravdin, a biostatistician at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston who led the research.

Some were skeptical several months ago when Ravdin and National Cancer Institute researchers first reported the 2003 drop in the breast cancer rate. The new numbers, which add 2004, prove this was no fluke, said Dr. Julie Gralow, a spokeswoman for the American Society of Clinical Oncology and cancer expert at the University of Washington in Seattle.

"Because it didn't bump back up again," it supports the idea that the rate has stabilized at a new lower level, said Gralow, who had no role in the study.

Brenda Edwards, one of the journal authors who is a National Cancer Institute researcher, agreed. "Now we have a statistically significant decline" over three years and clear proof of a trend, she said.

Although some recent analyses suggest heart risks from menopause hormones are not as great as had been believed for younger, newly menopausal women, the statistics out this week add to the worries about cancer.

After rising steadily through the 1990s, the breast cancer rate dipped from 2001 to 2002, from 138 cases to 135 cases per 100,000 women. After the federal Women's Health Initiative study reported in July 2002 on the health risks of hormones, use of the pills plunged.

So did the breast cancer rate the following year — to 126 cases per 100,000 women. It was the steepest fall since the government started keeping records in the 1970s.

The drop was seen in all of the cancer statistics registries reviewed in the study, and no other cancer rate changed as dramatically — strong signs that hormones were playing a role, specialists said.

The 2004 rate held steady at about 126 cases per 100,000.

Stopping hormone use may have stopped some cancers from growing and caused them to disappear, scientists speculate. Or it may have just slowed them down so that they won't appear until years later, said Ahmedin Jemal, an American Cancer Society researcher. Only time will tell which is true, he said.

Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, which makes top-selling hormone pills Prempro and Premarin, criticized the study as overly speculative. Company spokesman Dr. Joseph Camardo said hormone prescriptions continued to fall in 2004 but breast cancer rates did not decline proportionately.

Ravdin said the company's criticism does not invalidate the cancer trends.

Breast cancer is the most common major cancer in American women and the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women. About 180,000 new cases are expected to occur in the United States this year and more than 1 million worldwide.

Ovarian cancer is far less common. The British study found that even with the 20 percent greater risk from hormones, the actual risk was very low: 2.6 of every 1,000 hormone users developed ovarian cancer over five years compared to 2.2 in 1,000 non-hormone users.

Still, that means about 1,000 extra ovarian cancer deaths from 1991 through 2005, said study leaders at the Cancer Research UK Epidemiology Unit in Oxford.

Hormone use has declined already, and the new report should cause it to fall further, Dr. Steven Narod of the University of Toronto wrote in an editorial accompanying the study in The Lancet.

"We hope that the number of women dying of ovarian cancer will decline as well," he wrote.

Camardo, Wyeth's spokesman, said hormone labels already warn about an elevated risk of ovarian cancer.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070419/ap_on_he_me/hormones_cancer_7