June 17, 2009
Women from some backgrounds may be less likely to go for screening
Cancer screening saves lives. Thousands of lives every year, in fact.
We know that it can help spot cancer earlier, when it’s more likely that treatment will be successful. And cervical screening can actually help to prevent cancer from developing in the first place. But is everyone benefiting equally from the screening services we have?
A study published in the British Medical Journal this week says ‘no’.
In the past, we haven’t really had good information about the backgrounds of people going for screening, which meant that we didn’t know whether there were any inequalities in screening uptake. And since we didn’t know about them, we couldn’t do anything to try to reduce them.
So researchers from Oxford University, including Cancer Research UK’s Professor Valerie Beral, have piggybacked on a Government survey to ask more than 3,000 women about whether they had attended breast or cervical screening.
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Breast, Cervical, Early detection, Screening | 
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Posted by Jess Harris
May 2, 2009
Who will benefit from aspirin's cancer-preventing powers?
The humble over-the-counter drug aspirin hit the headlines this week, after the publication of a report led by a Cancer Research UK-funded scientist.
The researchers gathered together all the available evidence on cancer prevention, and concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence to make strong recommendations, particularly on aspirin dosage. But there was certainly a suggestion that taking aspirin in your forties could help prevent cancer later in life.
But how realistic is this? Should we all be popping aspirin as soon as we hit the big four-oh? Or do the risks outweigh the benefits?
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Bowel, Breast, Cancer Prevention, Cancer Research UK-funded research, Cancer in the news, Scientific papers | 
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Posted by Kat Arney
April 23, 2009
Cancer research is a complex puzzle
Cancer Research UK has been funding cutting-edge research for more than 100 years.
As we’ve explained, cancer research is a careful and painstaking process. While it’s often relatively easy to see the impact of, say, a clinical trial for a new treatment, it generally takes years of research and testing even to get that far.
So, often it’s only with the benefit of hindsight that we can see how research into a tiny molecule or a specific gene ends up making a difference.
In this series of posts, we’ll be picking out some of the most important discoveries and breakthroughs that we’ve been involved in – from fundamental cancer biology to clinical trials and population studies – to explain how they’ve made a major impact on our mission to beat cancer.
There is a separate page explaining how we’ve chosen the papers we’ll be covering in the series.
So in no particular order, we turn first to a fascinating piece of gene research from 2002.
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Breast, Cancer Research UK-funded research, Cancer Type, DNA, Genes, High-Impact Science, Science, Scientific papers, Screening | 
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Posted by Oliver Childs
April 10, 2009
What's out there on the web?
The BBC’s Newsnight programme ran a special investigation into cancer on Monday 6th April. Here’s a short segment entitled “Cancer: Does science have the answer?” featuring Cancer Research UK-funded scientists Paul Pharoah and Paul Workman, along with our Chief Clinician Peter Johnson.
The Newsnight team have also put together a report assessing cancer care in the UK compared to France. Although there are delays in the UK system, things are improving. There’s a longer article covering the story on the BBC website.
The programme also carried out a poll of more than a thousand UK adults, finding that although 6 out of ten people thought that the government had provided clear information about how to reduce the risk of cancer, only 3 out of ten people had acted on it.
As Sara Hiom, our director of Health Information says, “Our lifestyles can have a serious impact on our risk of many cancers, so we’d hope to see more people willing to make appropriate lifestyle changes.” When it comes to beating cancer, prevention has to go hand in hand with new treatments and early detection.
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Posted by Kat Arney
March 16, 2009
Do night shifts increase the risk of breast cancer?
Yesterday the Danish government announced that it would compensate women who had spent long periods working nights, and who went on to develop breast cancer.
The ruling comes a year after the the International Association for Research on Cancer weighed the evidence around shift-work and, somewhat surprisingly, concluded that there was ‘probably’ a link to breast cancer.
Ed posted a while ago about the strength of this evidence and, to summarise, there does appear to be a statistical link.
But, in our opinion, the studies to date are unclear as to whether shift work actually causes breast cancer, in and of itself, or whether shift workers are more likely do other things that increase their risk, like being inactive or overweight.
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Posted by Henry Scowcroft
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