Eric T. Rosenthal

Lance Armstrong leads the way in the fight against cancer

&NA; ▪ How the Lance Armstrong Foundation has joined forces with the American Cancer Society to mount a worldwide assault on the global cancer burden.

Who does the ‘media training’ in the world of oncology?

&NA; ▪ How do academic institutions deal with the media? Should they accept ‘media training’ from the pharmaceutical industry, as one company recently offered, or are they better off going it alone? Here Oncology Times looks at the situation in the United States, and next month we will review how the British cancer centres handle the situation.

Study Links Obesity to Survival in Epithelial Ovarian Cancer: Larger Numbers, Though, Needed to Override Potential Selection Bias

A retrospective study suggests that a link between obesity and decreased survival in epithelial ovarian cancer may be due to obesity itself, and not to other medical problems that are often associated with being overweight. The study, by researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s Women’s Cancer Research Institute at the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute in Los Angeles, was published online on August 28 in advance of its scheduled publication in the October 1 issue of Cancer. The conclusion was that obese patients were more likely to have cancer limited to the ovaries, and for those with advanced-stage disease, obesity was independently associated with a shorter time to recurrence and shorter overall survival. The findings, the authors wrote, suggest that excess body weight affects tumor biology, and studies are now under way to elucidate the molecular and hormonal mechanisms underlying these clinical observations.