There’s an App for Colon Cancer
So a patient interacts with these apps by entering all the information they know about their cancer, including stage, treatment history, status of genetic mutations, and where if and where the cancer has spread.
Based on this information, the program then provides personalized next steps which could diagnostic tests, clinical trials and potential drugs. All this information is based on peer-reviewed medical and scientific content.
dailyRx asked CollabRx, George Lundberg, MD, the editor-in-chief for CollabRx and a board-certified pathologist, to discuss how he envisions patients using this app.
Why Does Obesity Increase Colon Cancer Risk?
That’s the million dollar question. Scientists believe it may have something to do with insulin levels, but they’re not sure. The bottom line is, obesity contributes to colon cancer and many other illnesses as well. Until someone figures out how to stop that from happening, the onus is on us to reduce our risk by reducing our weight. Yes, easier said than done.
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Research has shown that obesity is a strong risk factor for adult-onset diabetes, but the link between obesity and cancer is generally less widely appreciated. Recent studies have confirmed that obesity may be associated with the incidence and mortality of a number of malignancies, including colon, pancreatic, and kidney, as well as aggressive prostate cancer in men and breast and endometrial cancer in women. An accumulating body of evidence suggests that the link between obesity and cancer may involve similar etiologic mechanisms that have been demonstrated to exist between obesity and diabetes.
Obesity is known to induce insulin resistance, a condition whereby some organs become resistant to the effect of insulin to shuttle glucose into cells, especially after a meal high in carbohydrates. To compensate for this resistance to insulin, the pancreas produces more insulin, which leads to an increase in circulating insulin levels. This compensation may continue for many years, but the pancreas cannot maintain this high insulin output indefinitely, especially in some susceptible individuals. It is then that insulin levels begin to decrease and blood sugar levels increase. When the blood sugar rise is severe enough, diabetes is diagnosed.
The link between insulin resistance and cancer may be related to the compensatory high levels of insulin. Insulin is an important growth factor for body tissues. That insulin is an important growth factor is not surprising because typically insulin increases when nutrients are plentiful, and drops dramatically during a fasting state. Insulin may signal cells to proliferate through a variety of mechanisms. Insulin could directly signal growth, or it could do this by increasing the levels of other more potent growth factors (insulin-like growth factors [IGF]), or it can make cells more sensitive to other growth factors. Although cancer is a complex, multifactorial disease, one of the consistent characteristics of cancer cells is their ability to growth uncontrollably and to be less resistant to die. Thus, growth factors are critical to the initial development of cancers, and to their progression. A number of studies now show that individuals with higher levels of circulating IGFs are at increased risk for developing colon, premenopausal breast, and aggressive prostate cancers than are individuals with lower levels.
“Some patients do not wish to study or even be consulted about their alternatives of treatment; they want the doctor to decide. That is partly a culture thing and partly an education thing. But, increasingly, health savvy and internet savvy patients insist on participating in key decisions about their care,” Dr. Lundberg said.
“The future of informed American medicine is physicians practicing patient-centered care and sharing in key decision with informed patients. Patients should feel empowered to take charge of their health; after all, it is their health. Our CollabRx Molecular Disease Models and the Apps that are based upon that science are perfectly tailored to facilitate such shared decision-making in some of the most complicated clinical situations imaginable,” Dr. Lundberg explained.
He added that patients can tell their physicians about the App and ask if the two of them can go through it together.
“Pathologists are gathering and interpreting molecular diagnostic information which has a significant clinical impact to patients and their oncologists,” said Douglas Blayney, MD, medical director Stanford Cancer Institute, Stanford, Calif., member of CollabRx editorial advisory board “The partnership with the CAP demonstrates another example of the collaboration between pathologists and oncologists to empower patients with resources to make informed decisions about their health.”
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