A recent study by the Mayo clinic presented at the Society for Neuro oncology annual scientific meeting  and Education day at Montreal, has revealed an extraordinary fact that children with low-grade brain tumors (gliomas) gain a much better prospect of survival with aggressive surgery. Moreover, the application of radiation therapy to an incomplete surgery provides the same results as should have been in case of a complete removal  surgery.

The study’s foremost pioneer, Nadia Laack, says ‘This study further reinforces Mayo Clinic’s practice of aggressive surgical resection’.  She further opines, ‘we found that when compared to previous studies, more children are now able to have complete removals, most likely due to the fact that we have better neuro-surgical techniques and better imaging techniques that help guide the surgeons’.

Now to establish their findings , Dr Laack with a few other researchers categorized 127 consecutive pediatric patients with WHO’s grade I and grade II low-grade gliomas who have  had treatment at the Mayo clinic between 1990 and 2005. According to the outcome of this experiment, 89% of the patients are surviving more than 10 years later.

Dr Laack merrily concludes, ‘This is great news for families because it shows that even if a complete surgery is not possible , adding radiation to a less -than complete surgery reduce their chances of tumor progression to yield the same outcome as if there was  a complete removal’.

Source : http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-11/mc-mcs112210.php

The findings by a team of international researchers under the leadership of the Mayo Clinic researchers show that individuals possessing a number of variants to the mutated BRCA1 gene face an increased risk of developing breast cancers. The findings have been published in the current issue of ‘Nature Genetics’.

The results of the study will help to determine the degree of risk for each BRCA1 gene carrier, states Fergus Couch, the investigator at Mayo Clinic and senior author of the study. It is also likely to provide useful insight into the hormone receptor linked to negative breast cancer among the general population.

It has been known that the genetic mutations within the BRCA1 gene put the carriers at risk for developing breast cancers. The researchers tried to determine whether the variations of mutated genes could alter the risk factor appreciably. Genome wide association studies were conducted in 20 different research centers spanning 11 countries around the globe.

The first study was a comparison of 550,000 human genome alterations in 1,193 carriers with breast cancer and 1,190 carriers without the invasive cancer of the breast. Both sets of carriers were under the age of 40. This led to the discovery of 96 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) which was corroborated by carrying out the same study in a larger context comprising of 3,000 carriers with breast cancer and 3,000 without. The researchers could isolate 5 SNPs associated with breast cancer risk from the region of the chromosome 19p13.

By observing these SNPs in a further 6,800 breast cancer patients without the mutated BRCA1 gene, the scientists found that the cancerous tumors were without estrogen receptors. Study of the 5 SNPs in another 2,300 breast cancer patients were found to be linked to the triple-negative breast cancer which is one of the most aggressive forms of cancer and accounts for 12% of all breast cancer incidences. The researchers could also ascertain that the SNPs had no link with the ovarian cancer in BRCA1 mutation carriers.

Source: http://www.news-medical.net/news/20100920/BRCA1-gene-mutation-increases-breast-cancer-risk-Research.aspx