Research

Another reason to get a good amount of sleep – protection against colon cancer

Getting a good amount of sleep (for most people, between 7 and 9 hours of sleep) has been advocated for a number of health reasons. Sleep is the time when the body gets to recharge itself, and is the time when the brain gets time to get back to a good working condition (various studies have shown that when a person does not get enough sleep, the brain becomes slower in operation, and in extreme conditions, if the brain has not get rest for 2 days or more, it starts shutting down to ensure that some amount of sleep is available). In addition, getting an inadequate amount of sleep is also associated with a higher risk for health problems such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and so on.
Researchers are always on the quest to find out linkages between diseases and various factors that can contribute to such problems, through statistical methods (since these statistical methods enable the finding out of linkages between cause and effect, and provide an entry point to more clinical investigation). In a similar such investigation, researchers have found out that getting less than six hours of sleep had led to an increase in the risk of developing colorectal adenomas (link to article):

Researchers from University Hospitals (UH) Case Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine found that individuals who averaged less than six hours of sleep at night had an almost 50 per cent increase in the risk of colorectal adenomas compared with individuals sleeping at least seven hours per night.
Adenomas are a precursor to cancer tumours, and left untreated, they can turn malignant. “A short amount of sleep can now be viewed as a new risk factor for the development of the development of colon cancer,” said Li Li, the study’s principal investigator.
The patients with adenomas were found in general to have reported sleeping less than six hours compared to those patients without adenomas (control) patients.

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Vitamin D – Vitally important to human health, and deficiencies can cause major problems

Doctors and people in the health industry know that Vitamin D is vitally important to human health, with the lack of Vitamin D influencing many problems in the human body. At the same time, a large number of people in the world suffer from Vitamin D deficiency (projected numbers of 1 billion the world over). Considering the huge impact of Vitamin D deficiency, it seems more clear that providing Vitamin D in the form of nutrition tablets / supplements is necessary. This becomes even more important when one considers the results of this study (link)that considered the impact of deficiency of Vitamin D on various genes in the human body that can impact cancer (and bet many of you never thought that Vitamin D could have something to do with cancer – one normally thinks of Vitamin as health supplements, not connected in any way to dangerous diseases).

Scientists have found that vitamin D influences more than 200 genes, including ones related to cancer and autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis — a discovery that shows how serious vitamin D deficiency can be. Vitamin D deficiency is a well-known risk factor for rickets, and some evidence suggests it may increase susceptibility to autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS), rheumatoid arthritis and type 1 diabetes, as well as certain cancers and even dementia. With this is mind, the group looked at disease-associated regions of the gene map to see if they had higher levels of VDR binding. They found VDR binding was “significantly enriched” in regions linked to several common autoimmune diseases, such as MS, type 1 diabetes and Crohn’s disease, as well as in regions associated with cancers such as leukaemia and colorectal cancer.

Vitamin D is created by the exposure of the skin to sunlight, something that has reduced over a period of time. Vitamin D can also be found in some natural occurring foods such as fish liver oil, eggs and fatty fish such as salmon, herring and mackerel. In addition, Vitamin D can also be provided as supplements, and it seems to be important that health departments ensure that people are getting these supplements.

Research: A simple blood test capable of detecting breast cancer in woman

Breast cancer is a very dangerous form of cancer for woman, affecting a large number of them over the globe. There are multiple projects going to do early detection, along with finding out the risk factors that increase the chances of the breast cancer happening in some woman much more than others. For example, as woman reach middle age and become older, recommendations include checking for breast cancer on a regular basis. There is an effort to try and detect breast cancers when they are much smaller, so that the chance of a successful treatment that will happen much quicker and be less prolonged gets increased. Right now, existing tests are through checking for lumps (can be through a self-examination) or through a mammogram. Well, research is indicating that a simpler blood test that checks for certain chemicals in the blood may also be a much faster alternative (link to article):

Normal breast screening checks, using Xray mammograms, detect a tumour only once it is three or four times bigger, by which time it may have started to spread beyond breast. But, this test can pick up a cancer the size of a small seed before a woman has developed any symptoms. Developed by the scientists, led by Norwegian company Diagenic ASA, the test looks for raised levels of chemical “markers” for cancer picked up as blood flows through tumour, the ‘Sunday Express’ reported.
Dr James Mackay, an oncologist and researcher at University College London, is helping to launch the blood test for private patients. “This test will be particularly useful for younger women who are at risk of developing breast cancer. “They tend to have denser breasts which mammograms cannot easily penetrate. We are suggesting they have a mammogram and combine it with this test so that there is a greater chance of detection,” he said.