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New research finds that although far more caregivers now place babies on their backs to sleep — a practice that reduces the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)– that encouraging trend has leveled off since 2001.

The study also shows that black mothers and caregivers are more likely than whites to place infants on their stomachs to sleep.

But among all races, the most common reasons for using the stomach position were concerns about infant choking and infant comfort, said Dr. Eve Colson, lead author of the study published in the December issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

“It also still looks like the really important thing is that they get very specific advice that they should only put the baby on its back,” added Colson, an associate professor of pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine.

The onus to deliver that message, she said, lies largely with physicians and health-care providers.

According to background information in the study, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, SIDS is the leading cause of death after birth in the United States.

“SIDS is extremely tragic, but the risk period is relatively short. Most occur between 0 and 6 months and the peak period is 2 to 4 months, although cases can occur during the first year,” said Marian Willinger, special assistant for SIDS research at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

Since the NICHD launched its Back to Sleep campaign in 1994, the number of babies placed on their backs to sleep jumped from 25 percent to about 70 percent and the SIDs rate declined by more than 50 percent.

Still, black infants have more than double the incidence of SIDS as white infants and are also more likely to be placed on their stomachs for sleeping, the researchers found.

This National Infant Sleep Position study consisted of telephone surveys of nighttime caregivers (usually mothers) of babies aged 7 months or younger. About 1,000 interviews were conducted each year between 1993 and 2007 across the United States.

Throughout the period, the rate of supine sleep (on the back) increased while prone sleeping (on the stomach) decreased over all groups.

But in 2001, that downward slope leveled off across the board.

Those putting babies to sleep on their stomachs, regardless of race, were more likely to express worries about comfort and choking and say they had not been given a clear directive from a doctor.

Yet neither choking nor comfort should be a concern.

“There have been a couple of good studies that babies do not choke on their backs, that there are no adverse health outcomes of putting babies on their back,” Colson said.

“Stomach sleepers spend more time in deeper sleep but that doesn’t mean they’re not sleeping when they’re on their back,” Willinger said. Back sleepers “may wake up more frequently but young babies like that are going to be up to nurse anyway.”

Even sleeping on the side can be risky for babies, Willinger stressed. That’s because babies placed on their sides often roll on to their stomachs.

Almost half the mothers surveyed in the study said that they had received no advice at all from their physician or that he/she had recommended stomach sleeping.

“This gives us a very strong warning signal that we’re not doing a very good job in part of our population, and signal that there may be more ethnic differences,” said Dr. Andrew Colin, director of pediatric pulmonology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

In fact, those ethnic differences may even be biological, he stated, and not resolvable by placing babies on their backs.

When used with ultrasound, elastography helps distinguish between cancerous and benign breast lesions, which reduces unnecessary biopsies, U.S. researchers have found.

About 80 percent of breast lesions that are biopsied turn out to be benign, according to the American Cancer Society.

“There’s a lot of room to improve specificity with ultrasound, and elastography can help us do that,” Dr. Stamatia V. Destounis, a diagnostic radiologist at Elizabeth Wende Breast Care in Rochester, N.Y., and the study’s lead author, said in a news release from the Radiological Society of North America. “It’s an easy way to eliminate needle biopsy for something that’s probably benign.”

Elastography measures the compressibility and mechanical properties of a lesion. Cancerous tumors tend to be stiffer than surrounding tissues or cysts, whereas benign lesions are more compressible.

“You can perform elastography at the same time as hand-held ultrasound and view the images on a split screen, with the two-dimensional ultrasound image on the left and the elastography image on the right,” Destounis said.

As part of an ongoing study, 179 women underwent breast ultrasound and elastography. The researchers performed biopsies on the 134 solid lesions they detected. . They found that elastography correctly identified 98 percent of cancerous lesions and 82 percent of benign lesions, and they also determined that elastography was more accurate than ultrasound in gauging the size of the lesions.

The findings were to be presented Nov. 30 in Chicago at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

In another study scheduled to be presented at the meeting, researchers found that high-frequency ultrasound with elastography can help distinguish between cancerous and benign skin lesions, which could improve the efficiency of skin cancer diagnosis.

Dr. Eliot L. Siegel, vice chairman of the radiology department at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and the study’s lead author, said in the news release that “dermatologists tend to biopsy any lesions that seem visually suspicious for disease.”

“Consequently,” he said, “many benign lesions are needlessly biopsied in order to avoid the risk of missing a potentially deadly melanoma.”

Siegel and his colleagues used ultra-high-frequency ultrasound to image cancerous and benign skin lesions on 40 people. They also calculated the elasticity ratio of the lesions and adjacent normal skin and used laboratory analysis to confirm their diagnoses. They found that benign lesions had high levels of elasticity, whereas cancerous lesions were much less elastic. The elasticity ratio of normal skin to adjacent lesions ranged from 0.04 to 0.3 for benign lesions to above 10.0 for cancerous lesions.

“The visualized portion of a skin lesion can be just the tip of the iceberg, and most dermatologists operate ‘blindly’ beyond what they can see on the surface,” Siegel said. “High-frequency ultrasound provides almost microscopic resolution and enables us to get size, shape and extent of the lesion prior to biopsy.”

People who work in detergent factories are at increased risk of developing respiratory problems, including asthma, probably from exposure to chemicals contained in detergent, two new studies hint.

But a spokesman for the detergent industry argues that the findings from these studies don’t apply to the US and European detergent industries at large. “Over the years, the detergent industry has developed successful product stewardship programs to promote the safe use of enzymes, using appropriate risk assessment and risk management strategies to avoid unacceptable risks in the workplace,” Richard Sedlak, vice president of technical and internal affairs for The Soap and Detergent Association (SDA), said in a prepared statement.

While the author of one of the new studies agrees that the industry overall has done a good job protecting workers, he said regulatory agencies’ current exposure standards are too high.

Exposure to chemicals found in powdered detergent was first recognized in 1969 to cause job-related asthma. Since then, the industry has introduced measures for limiting workers’ exposure, although outbreaks of occupational asthma still occur.

In the latest issue of the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Dr. Frits van Rooy of the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences in Utrecht, The Netherlands, and colleagues note that workers exposed to detergents in liquid form are not considered to be at risk of these lung problems. But their findings suggest that they should be.

In a related paper, Dr. Paul Cullinan of Imperial College in London and his colleagues report evidence suggesting that current standards for workplace exposure to powdered detergent chemicals are too high to protect workers from respiratory problems.

The chemicals in question are enzymes, which break down other chemicals, and hence help remove stains. The four types of enzymes used in detergents include proteases, which break down proteins; alpha-amylases, which break down starch; lipases, which break down fat; and cellulases, which break down cellulase, a major component of plants.

Cullinan and his team looked specifically at the relationship between lower or upper respiratory disease and exposure to proteases. They compared 570 workers in a European detergent factory who had developed respiratory problems ranging from runny, itchy noses to asthma, to an additional 2,137 workers with no respiratory disease.

Workers in areas where protease exposure was the highest were at double the risk of lower respiratory disease, Cullinan and his team found, while even lower exposures increased the risk of upper respiratory problems.

And the airborne protease concentrations found to produce these symptoms were well within current regulatory guidelines designed to protect workers’ health. However, Cullinan noted in an email to Reuters Health, “most of the industry works to very low exposure standards already, essentially far lower than those set by regulating authorities (which are almost certainly too high).”

Van Rooy and his team looked at 109 people working in a factory producing liquid detergent, placing them into three groups based on their level of exposure. The 16 percent of workers in the highest exposure group were at four times greater risk of itchy nose and sneezing than the lowest-exposure group, who made up half of the study population. Risk of wheezing in the highest-exposure group was tripled.

Blood tests of 106 of the workers showed that 14 percent were sensitized to at least one of the enzymes contained in the detergent; this meant their bodies were hypersensitive to the chemical, putting them at risk of developing an allergy to it. One worker appeared to have developed allergic asthma related to workplace enzyme exposure, while two workers had allergic rhinitis (stuffy, runny, itchy nose).

The researchers conclude that “exposure to liquid detergent enzymes should be regarded as an occupational hazard leading to sensitization and occupational allergy,” and call for companies to minimize this exposure.

While better regulatory standards are clearly necessary, Cullinan said, more data is needed before they can be set. “Setting proper standards will require further work, but this should not be difficult for an industry who for many years has taken great care in measuring both exposures and health outcomes in their factory workforces.”

Falls in the home can lead to serious injury, including the all-too-common broken hip.

The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons offers these suggestions to minimize the risk of falling:
Keep stairs clear and well-lit, and make sure there are handrails on both sides. Also, there should be no loose rugs, carpets or boards.
Make sure there’s a slip-resistant rug outside the shower, with handrails and non-skid strips on the shower/tub floor.
In the bedroom, make sure there is clear and easy access to the door. Also, keep a lamp or flashlight near the bed.
Install a night light in the hallway, making that late-night trip to the bathroom safer.
Make sure furniture and decorations don’t block walkways.
Keep all cords neat and out of the way, and all rugs or carpets firmly attached to the floor.

New research suggests that people with multiple sclerosis who have relapses within five years of developing the disease are more likely to suffer from severe limitations in the short term than others with the condition.

The findings, published Nov. 4 in Neurology, show that people with the disease who relapse within five years of developing it are nearly 50 percent more likely to need a cane to walk during that time period.

But on the brighter side, the study found that early relapses seem to be less important to the progression of the disease later in life.

“Our findings may represent an important message to people diagnosed with MS today,” study author Helen Tremlett, from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, said in a news release from the American Academy of Neurology. “Those who have a history of relapses could potentially be offered reassurance that, as time goes on, these relapses will have a diminishing effect on their everyday lives.”

For their study, the researchers looked at the experiences during an average of 20 years of nearly 2,500 people with multiple sclerosis who experienced relapses in British Columbia. During those two decades, 11,722 relapses were recorded.

Tremlett said the study also supports the development of “new medications that target axonal [nerve] degeneration, which is suspected of causing permanent disability, especially for people who have had MS for many years or who are older at diagnosis.”

The study also reported that relapses in people younger than 25 affected disability longer than they did in people older than 35.

“There may be a longer window of opportunity for treating younger people with MS right away, changing the course of progression later on,” Tremlett said.

A brief course of hormone-blocking therapy can provide small benefits to a specific group of men who get radiation therapy for prostate cancer, a long-running study shows.

Ten-year survival was 62 percent in men with cancers graded as intermediate risk who got treatment that blocked their male hormone activity in addition to radiation therapy, compared to 57 percent of those who got radiation therapy alone, said Dr. Christopher U. Jones, a radiation oncologist at Radiological Associates of Sacramento, a member of the group who reported the results Monday at the American Society for Radiation Oncology annual meeting, in Chicago.

When biopsies were taken from men in the group, no traces of cancer were found in 78 percent of those having combined hormone-radiation therapy, compared to 60 percent of those who got radiation therapy alone.

The benefit is statistically significant but not huge, because “we weren’t expecting large differences” in such cases, Jones said. And while study results already are incorporated in medical practice, it is not the final word on the issue, since the field is still evolving, he said.

“The standard of care in radiation therapy has changed since the study began in 1994,” Jones said. “We can now localize treatment more so we give higher doses of radiation, 50 percent higher.”

Even the definition of “intermediate risk” has changed over the years, he said. It is based on such factors as levels of prostate-specific antigen, a hormone produced by the gland, and Gleason score, a measure of the prostate’s orderly structure.

“Since the study opened, we have more data and are better able to determine who is truly at low risk,” Jones said. “Of the 2,000 we enrolled, we now know that 685 were truly low-risk, 1,068 were at intermediate risk and 226 were high-risk.”

His summary of the results: “For the low-risk group, there is very little benefit in adding hormonal therapy. The most benefit is for those at intermediate risk, with high-risk patients in the middle.”

In other words, “what we can show in this study is that patients can be spared hormonal therapy if they fit the modern definition of low-risk,” Jones said.

That can be a big help, since side effects of hormone-blocking therapy include impotence and hot flashes, he said.

One reason why the study was undertaken was a growing use of hormonal therapy for men getting radiation treatment for prostate cancer, explained Dr. Anthony Zietman, a professor of radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School, incoming president of the radiation oncology society.

“There were some worries about the long-term consequences of hormone-deprivation therapy,” Zietman said. “This study tells us that the majority of guys diagnosed with prostate cancer don’t need hormone therapy at all.”

Decision-making in such cases starts with a choice between surgery or radiation therapy. Physicians tend to prefer surgery for younger patients, but that decision can also depend on the choice of the patient, Zietman said. And there is some flexibility in the actual treatment to be given.

If radiation is the choice, treatment can then consist of a little bit of hormone therapy, for four months, or an increased radiation dose, he said.

“We know now that higher doses of radiation are better than lower doses,” Jones said. “If higher doses of radiation are used, do you also need hormone therapy? A trial is just opening to ask that question.”

Two other reports presented at the meeting revealed favorable results about proton therapy, in which prostate cancer is attacked by a beam of protons rather than X-rays. Physicians at the University of Florida in Jacksonville reported that proton therapy did not appear to have harmful effects to the urinary system, which had been feared. And a study at Loma Linda University in California found that a booster round of proton therapy reduced recurrence of prostate cancer in men who first had X-ray treatment.

Fewer women in the United States are dying from breast cancer, but disparities in death rates still exist between whites and blacks, a new report shows.

Deaths from breast cancer have dropped more than 2 percent each year since 1990. And in the past decade that decline in deaths has been shared by black, Hispanic and white women. But black women still have a 40 percent higher death rate from breast cancer than white women, according to the report, Breast Cancer Facts & Figures 2009-2010, released Wednesday by the American Cancer Society.

“The breast cancer death rate continues to decrease since the 1990s in U.S. women because of improved treatments and increased mammography screening rates,” said Dr. Ahmedin Jemal, strategic director for cancer surveillance at the American Cancer Society.

The death rate from breast cancer peaked in 1989, Jemal said. “The most recent data from 2006 shows the breast cancer death rates have dropped nearly 30 percent,” he said. “That’s very good news.”

When this data is translated into the number of women with breast cancer who did not die, some 130,000 lives were saved, he noted.

Jemal said the decline in breast cancer deaths could be accelerated with more targeted treatment, more access to mammography, and more treatment for the poor and the uninsured.

Among uninsured women, only 30 percent had a mammogram during the past two years, compared with about 70 percent of insured women, he said.

All women should have regular screening for breast cancer, Jemal said. “If breast cancer is caught early, the five-year survival rate is 98 percent, but if you catch it late the survival rate is only 24 percent,” he added.

Another way to lower the risk of death from breast cancer is to promote prevention, Jemal said. This includes maintaining a healthy body weight, keeping fit through exercise, and limiting alcohol consumption, he said.

Dr. Harold J. Burstein, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said, “We are making real progress against breast cancer.”

“Sometimes there is a lot of nihilism. People worry that we are not winning the war on cancer,” he said. “In this particular battle, we are clearly winning. It is slow, hard progress, but we are winning.”

“We are not winning because we have a new secret weapon,” Burstein added. “We are winning because we have a better infrastructure, because we have educated patients and doctors, because we do have new tools becoming available, because we have new insights into the biology of the cancer — all those things are making a difference.”

Other highlights of the report include:
In 2009, some 192,370 American women will be diagnosed with breast cancer, accounting for more than one in four cancers diagnosed.
In 2009, an estimated 40,170 women will die from breast cancer; only lung cancer kills more women.
Data from 2006 — the most recent statistics available — showed that about 2.5 million American women have a history of breast cancer. Most of these women were cancer-free. Others were still undergoing treatment.
From 2002 to 2003, there was sharp decline in breast cancer rates, particularly for women aged 50 to 69. This reflects the drop in hormone replacement therapy by menopausal and postmenopausal women that began in 2002. Breast cancer rates have remained about the same since 2003.
Since 1990, breast cancer death rates have dropped steadily. The decline has been greater among women under 50 (3.2 percent per year) than among women over 50 (2 percent per year).
From 1997 to 2006, breast cancer deaths dropped by 1.9 percent a year among white and Hispanic women, 1.6 percent a year among black women, and 0.6 percent annually among Asian-American and Pacific Islander women. Death rates have stayed the same for American Indians and Alaska Natives.

SOURCES: Ahmedin Jemal, D.V.M., Ph.D., strategic director, cancer surveillance, American Cancer Society, Atlanta; Harold J. Burstein, M.D., Ph.D., Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and assistant professor, medicine, Harvard Medical School, both in Boston; Sept. 30, 2009, American Cancer Society report, Breast Cancer Facts & Figures 2009-2010

If excess weight doesn’t kill you by old age, it could make your life miserable in the form of chronic health problems and impaired mental fitness.

According to a new study, women who are obese in middle age are almost 80 percent more likely to have multiple health problems by the time they reach age 70.

“Those who gained weight [in adulthood] actually suffered reduced odds of healthy survival,” said study author Dr. Qi Sun, a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health’s department of nutrition.

“The key message is that women really need to keep a healthy weight from early adulthood to midlife to enjoy a healthy and long life,” he added.

Sun added, however, that the women in the study had nonetheless survived to their eighth decade, meaning they remained healthier than the general population.

The study findings were published in the Sept. 30 online edition of the journal BMJ.

Previous research had focused on how excess weight affects survival, rather than how healthy that survival looks in older adults, said Sun.

The new study is well-timed, given that the U.S. population is not only aging rapidly but ballooning rapidly. Two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, up from 14.5 percent in 1976, when this study started.

The study authors analyzed data on 17,065 women participating in the Nurses’ Health Study. Volunteers were, on average, 50 years old when the study began with no major chronic conditions or major mental or physical problems.

Twenty years later, only about 10 percent of women had “healthy survival,” and obese women were 79 percent less likely to have healthy survival than the slim minority.

Overweight as early as age 18 affected healthy survival the most, although women who were lean in their late teens who later gained weight still had lower odds of healthy survival, the study found.

Every kilogram (2.2 pounds) of extra weight lowered the odds of healthy survival by 5 percent, according to the study.

“We typically see this struggle not only in middle age but even as teenagers. If you struggle as a teenager, you’re going to struggle for the rest of your life,” said Eugenio Lopez, a registered nurse with the Texas A&M Health Science Center Coastal Bend Health Education Center in Corpus Christi.

And women may be starting out at a disadvantage, Lopez added.

“We typically see more women than men in diabetes programs. Women outnumber men 4-to-1 or 5-to-1,” Lopez said. “They’re genetically predisposed to hold more fatty cells than men are.”

“The data is following common sense,” added Dr. Mitchell Roslin, chief of the bariatric surgery program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. “Why do people die? Of cardiovascular disease and cancer, and women die of colon and breast cancer. What has been linked to obesity? Breast cancer, colon cancer and cardiovascular disease.”

The economic downturn may not be all bad. In fact, U.S. researchers say recessions may actually be good for health.

University of Michigan researchers looked at death rates during the Great Depression, the worst economic slump in the 20th century. From the stock market crash of 1929 through the early 1930s, economic activity fell sharply, dropping 14 percent in 1932, while unemployment hit 22.9 percent that same year.

Black and white images from the era of bread lines and migrant farmers make it easy to assume the economic misery would have affected public health.

But when the researchers looked at mortality rates among men, women and children from 1920 to 1940, they found death rates declined during years of falling economic activity and rose when times were better.

The study is in the Sept. 28 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

During the two decades spanning the 1920s and 1930s, overall life expectancy increased by 8.8 years. But it wasn’t a steady rise, instead shooting up and falling back in a pattern that correlated with the rise and fall of economic activity.

Between 1921 and 1926, the so-called “Roaring 20s” and a time of robust economic growth, life expectancy for non-white men fell by 8.1 years. Yet between 1929 and 1933, the years of steepest economic decline, their life expectancy grew a similar amount.

Likewise, non-white women lost 7.4 years of life expectancy during the Roaring 20s, but they gained 8.2 years of life expectancy during the Depression.

Whites showed a similar pattern, though the loss in life expectancy wasn’t as extreme as for non-whites.

“The basic finding of the paper is that mortality rates tend to evolve in parallel to the economy,” said lead study author Jose Tapia Granados, an assistant research scientist at University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. “When the economy goes up, mortality tends to go up. When the economy goes down, mortality rates tend to go down, too.”

Researchers did find one exception. During the 1920s and 1930s, two-thirds of all deaths were caused by cardiovascular and renal diseases, cancer, influenza and pneumonia, tuberculosis, motor vehicle accidents and suicide.

All became less deadly during difficult economic times, with the exception of suicides. But suicides accounted for fewer than 2 percent of all deaths, not enough to alter the overall trend, the study authors added.

The country’s climb out of the Great Depression began in 1933. The economy grew by more than 10 percent annually from 1933 to 1936. Mortality again peaked in 1936, four years after the worst year of the Depression, even for children under age 4.

The surge in deaths in 1936 isn’t just attributable to lag time, the researchers noted. Deaths from motor vehicle accidents went up, in which lag time would not play a role.

So why would the return of good times be bad for health?

More economic activity means people have money to drive cars, meaning more die in auto wrecks, the researchers theorize. In the 1920s and 1930s, cars became objects of mass consumption.

As motor vehicle use increases, so does pollution. Recent studies have linked particulate matter from cars and trucks and carbon monoxide with heart attacks and strokes.

During periods of growth, people have more money to spend on alcohol and cigarettes. And more economic activity means more factory orders, meaning people are working harder and longer and sleeping less.

Still, this is not to say that losing a job is good for your health. The study looks at the bigger picture — fewer cars, fewer people working overtime, less pollution — and how it may benefit public health as a whole.

A similar pattern may be at work during the current downturn, the authors suggested.

“My expectation is that mortality rates in 2008 will be lower than in 2007, and probably in 2009 will be lower than 2008,” Tapia said. “There is a general improvement, even though suicides are going up.”

Joshua Klapow, associate professor at the University of Alabama Birmingham’s School of Public Health, said he would be cautious about applying any of the findings to today’s recession.

Society has changed significantly in the past 60 to 80 years, he said. Medical advances enable people to live with chronic diseases for much longer nowadays. Infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, kill fewer people today. Fewer people do manual labor, smoking has declined, and obesity has shot up.

“The only points of similarity are the economic factors,” Klapow said. “You can’t equate health status, health care, health costs or lifestyles with the 1920s or the 1930s. You have confounding factors right now that prevent us from drawing any reasonable conclusion about our current state.”

And during this downturn, studies show that many Americans are making poor health choices, such as cutting back on medications and putting off medical care because of costs.

“We have a lot of indicators during this economic turmoil that the health status of our population is not getting better,” Klapow said. “The study is fascinating, but we have to be very careful not to forecast a trajectory to our present day.”

The drug vorinostat is able to cross the blood-brain barrier and reduce the development of large metastatic tumors in mice brains by 62 percent when compared to mice that did not receive the drug, according to a new study. In humans, the drug has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of a cancer called cutaneous T-cell lymphoma but can be used experimentally to study its effectiveness against other cancers. This research, by investigators at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, and their collaborators, appears online Sept. 29, 2009, in Clinical Cancer Research.

For people, while various therapies are improving the survival of breast cancer patients, the incidence of breast cancer spreading to the brain is increasing. Brain metastases of breast cancer have proven to be largely untreatable because the blood-brain barrier, which arises from the specialized structure of blood capillaries in the brain, severely limits drug access and many drugs are actively transported out of brain at this barrier. Consequently, the one-year survival estimate for breast cancer patients after a diagnosis of brain metastasis is only about 20 percent.

Vorinostat has been found to slow the growth of primary tumors of several different types of cancer in mice. Previous studies have suggested that the drug can be taken up by the brain, although little was known about its effects on metastatic tumors. Therefore, to study the effect of vorinostat on the formation of brain metastases, scientists used a mouse model of human breast cancer. Human breast cells were cultured in the laboratory and were injected into mice with compromised immune systems. The breast cancer cells then migrated to the brain, forming metastases.

“Drugs that can cross the blood-brain barrier and reduce the size and incidence of metastatic tumors are urgently needed,” said Patricia S. Steeg, Ph.D., study author, Center for Cancer Research, NCI. The researchers found that vorinostat was absorbed readily into normal mouse brains, and accumulation of the drug was up to three-fold higher in some metastases treated with this drug when compared to surrounding brain tissue. Vorinostat also reduced the development of tiny tumors (micrometastases) in mice by 28 percent when compared with mice that did not receive this therapy.

The ability of vorinostat to reduce metastatic lesions in the brain was linked to a novel double-barreled mechanism — the drug can cause breaks in both strands of a DNA helix and can also lower the activity of a DNA repair gene called Rad52. The researchers hypothesize that the inability of the cancer cells to repair DNA damage would then slow the rate of tumor cell metastasis.

In June of this year, several researchers affiliated with this study published a paper in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics showing that vorinostat could enhance the effect of radiation therapy in mice with brain cancer metastasis. Mice that received implants of human breast tumors in their brains lived the longest after treatment with both vorinostat and radiation, demonstrating that the drug enhances the sensitivity of cancer cells to radiation therapy. “Taken together with our current finding, researchers have now established a preclinical basis for testing this drug in clinical trials in humans,” said Steeg.