health and safety: In 20 yrs, cancer will lose its sting: Expert

Friday, May 15, 2009

In 20 yrs, cancer will lose its sting: Expert

London: While the rate of cancer survival has been improving day by day, a British expert reckons that cancer will no longer be a killer in the next 20 years.
    Karol Sikora, professor of Cancer Medicine at Imperial College London, has said that the treatments for the disease are undergoing a "revolution", which means that within just two decades, "we will simply run out of things from which to die".
    And rather than facing a possible death sentence, cancer patients will be treated as if they have a long-term illness like diabetes, heart disease or asthma. Sikora said that better technologies, better delivery systems to treat the disease, and financial constraints are expected in the near future.
    And as improved cancer care leads to better survival rates, higher prevalence of the disease in our populations will lead to greater societal pressures as people will be expecting much more from medicine. "Within 20 years cancer will be a chronic disease, joining conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and asthma," the Daily Express quoted Sikora as saying.
    "These conditions impact on the way people live and do not inexorably lead to death. The model of prostate cancer, where many men die with it rather than from it, will be common for most cancers.
    "Even greater progress will be made in understanding myriad causes of cancer," Silora added.
    Hazel Nunn, health information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: "In recent decades cancer survival has been improving dramatically." The Government's cancer tsar, Mike Richards, said: "We will see more cancers being cured and some others may become more chronic illnesses." AGENCIES
Ginger eases chemo nausea
    Ginger, long used as a folk remedy for soothing tummyaches, helped tame one of the most dreaded side effects of cancer treatment — nausea from chemotherapy, the first large study to test the herb for this has found.
    People who started taking ginger capsules several days before a chemo infusion had fewer and less severe bouts of nausea afterward than others who were given dummy capsules, the federally funded study found. "We were slightly beside ourselves" to see how much it helped, said study leader Julie Ryan of the University of Rochester in New York. But don't reach for the ginger ale. Many sodas and cookies contain only flavoring — not real ginger, Ryan said. Still, ginger capsules may offer a cheap, simple way to fight nausea, which is far more than just a quality-of-life issue, doctors say. AP