Hazel Nunn

New tricks for old drugs – blocking oestrogen to prevent breast cancer

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Hazel Nunn

Can drugs like tamoxifen be used to prevent breast cancer?

Tamoxifen is one of the mainstays of breast cancer treatment. Since the early 1980s, it’s been given to women who’ve had breast cancer to try to stop the disease returning.

As a result, it’s saved the lives of millions around the world, and some regard it as the most important cancer drug ever developed.

But today this old drug returns to the spotlight, with a new study showing that tamoxifen and other oestrogen- blocking medicines can reduce the chances of healthy women developing breast cancer.

We’ve blogged before about the discovery of tamoxifen, and Cancer Research UK’s role in its development.

But until now it’s not been clear whether tamoxifen and related drugs might have benefits for healthy women. Today’s finding, by an international team led by Cancer Research UK-funded researchers, provides the best evidence yet that these drugs could be used to help prevent breast cancer in women at average and above-average risk of the disease.

This is hugely significant. If benefits are shown to outweigh the risks, offering women at high risk of breast cancer a drug to lower their risk, could potentially prevent many thousands of breast cancer cases in the UK alone.

Let’s look at their findings, and at what happens next.

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Leaders team up to combat cancer worldwide

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Hazel Nunn

There needs to be international action on tobacco

Today, leaders from cancer organisations across the world – from Australia to Argentina, and Taiwan to Turkey – have issued a joint statement about how to address the growing burden of cancer worldwide.

It’s the first time that so many eminent cancer scientists and policy makers, from so many nations, have spoken with one voice about what needs to be done to combat cancer – in the poorest as well as the richest nations.

The statement comes off the back of a consensus meeting of 25 leaders of cancer organisations, chaired by our Chief Executive, Dr Harpal Kumar, and Professor Harold Varmus, Director of the US National Cancer Institute.

It aims both to raise the profile of global cancer issues, and to act as an urgent clarion call to action. The report is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine – but we’ve summarised its key points below. Continue reading →

Breast cancer in the UK: can we do even better?

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Hazel Nunn

UK breast cancer survival is worse than in comparable countries – why?

In the UK we’re making great progress against breast cancer – over 85 per cent of women diagnosed with the disease survive for at least five years. And around two thirds of all women diagnosed with breast cancer can expect to survive their disease for at least 20 years.

But today’s results from the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership (ICBP) – a study of cancer survival rates in some of the worlds’ richest countries – serve as a reminder that we could be doing even better, and it gives some clues about how.

It’s the latest in a string of important papers from ICBP. The first showed that while UK survival is improving, it lags behind the best in the world. And for the four cancers studied in ICBP, it is only in breast cancer that are we closing the gap.

Two recent papers examined the reasons for the UK’s relatively poor ovarian and lung cancer survival. They suggested that the differences between countries – and the UK’s poorer statistics – were caused more by differences in access to treatment than by being diagnosed at a late stage.

The new research, which drew on data from more than 250,000 breast cancer patients, paints a similar picture. It shows that survival rates for women diagnosed in the UK are lower than those in Australia, Canada, Norway, Denmark or Sweden – with 87 per cent of women survived their disease for at least three years after diagnosis (known as ‘three-year survival’) compared with 94 per cent in Canada (the highest in the study).

Although the overall differences between the countries weren’t that large – women with breast cancer generally fare well across all the countries studied – a closer look at the numbers reveals some good and some bad news.

This is possible because, like the lung and ovarian cancer studies, the new analysis also looked at the proportion of breast cancers diagnosed at different stages of the disease, and tallied this against the chances of surviving at each of these stages. This yields important clues about the root causes of the UK’s poorer breast cancer survival. Let’s have a look at the details.

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Spreading the word about cancer worldwide

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Hazel Nunn

Today is World Cancer Day. In the UK barely a day goes by without a cancer story in the headlines or politicians debating a cancer-related issue. Here cancer is high on the political agenda and in the public consciousness – and rightly so.

But that’s not true everywhere. In countries threatened by a swathe of serious public health issues, cancer can be all but forgotten.

World Cancer Day is about making sure that doesn’t happen. It’s also an opportunity for an organisation like Cancer Research UK to reflect on our role in the global fight against cancer.

What’s World Cancer Day about?

This year’s focus is on dispelling damaging myths and misconceptions about cancer.

The four myths that they are hoping to bust are:

Cancer is an issue of the wealthy, elderly and developed countries
Cancer is a death sentence
Cancer is my fate
Cancer is just a health issue.

We’d counter each of these in turn by saying:

Cancer is a global issue
More people are surviving cancer than ever before
Tobacco and infection are the most common causes of cancer worldwide
Cancer is a social, economic and political issue.

Here we explain a little more about each of these, and how Cancer Research UK is working to improve things on a global level.

Continue reading →

New horizons for lung cancer?

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Hazel Nunn

Progress is being made in lung cancer

Beating lung cancer is one of our greatest challenges. It’s the most common cancer in the world – a staggering 1.61 million new cases are diagnosed every year. In the UK, it is the second most common cancer, and each year more than 38,000 people are diagnosed with the disease.

And improvements in survival rates for lung cancer have been modest – they haven’t yet mirrored the tremendous progress seen in some other diseases such as children’s cancers.

In fact, one in five people who die of cancer die from lung cancer. This is largely because it’s usually diagnosed at a late stage, when treatment is less likely to be successful.

Perhaps this is why we rarely see newspaper headlines screaming of breakthroughs in lung cancer. But actually there are good things to shout about when it comes to this disease.

In the UK, lung cancer treatment continues to improve across the NHS. And, as highlighted on this blog recently, there’s been a tripling of money spent on lung cancer research in the UK in just 8 years – proportionally more than in any other cancer.

Two pieces of research this month give us yet more hope that we’ll see better improvements in lung cancer survival rates in the future.

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First indication that bowel screening is working

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Hazel Nunn

Is the rise in bowel cancer incidence due to screening?

This week we’ve released new figures showing bowel cancer is on the rise.

Between 2006 and 2008, the number of bowel cancer cases increased by around 10 per cent among people in their 60s.

After 10 years of stable bowel cancer rates, you might think that this would start alarm bells ringing. Far from it. The most likely cause of this new trend isn’t binge drinking or unhealthy diets brought on by the global economic downturn.

Instead the increase is almost certainly down to the introduction of bowel screening.

And the new figures suggest that screening is doing exactly what it set out to do.

Continue reading →

Breast cancer – why do the over-70s often fare worse?

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Hazel Nunn

Why do some older women with breast cancer fare worse?

A new study published in the British Journal of Cancer today sheds some light on why older women with breast cancer tend to fare more poorly than their younger counterparts.

Previous studies have told us that age affects the odds of surviving breast cancer. But until now scientists could only speculate as to why this might be.

This new research puts late diagnosis and treatment differences into the frame.

Continue reading →