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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has taken the unusual step of contradicting colleagues at an agency within the National Institutes of Health after they claimed that a study they conducted into the effects of radio frequency radiation (RFR) showed “clear evidence” of an association with a form of heart cancer. Scientists from the National Toxicology Program (NTP), part of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences within the National Institutes of Health, issued a report on November 1 in which they said that their study clearly showed that male rats exposed to high levels of RFR developed heart...

Exercise after a cancer diagnosis improves survival, even in patients who had not exercised previously, concludes a new study. The findings come from an analysis of detailed epidemiological data collected over 14 years from a cohort of 5807 patients who were diagnosed with a variety of cancers. A significant survival benefit of exercise was seen in patients with one of eight specific tumors, including breast, colon, prostate, ovarian, bladder, endometrial, esophageal, and skin cancer (mostly melanoma). Regular exercisers had the biggest survival advantage over their sedentary peers. Patients who exercised three to four times each week before and after their...

Mortality rates from the most common cancers continue to decline across the United States, with several notable exceptions, including liver cancer in men and especially in women, and also uterine cancer in women. These findings come from the latest American Cancer Society annual report on cancer rates and trends, “Cancer Statistics 2019.” The report was published online January 8 in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. Overall cancer death rates dropped by 27% in the 25 years from 1991 to 2016, Rebecca Siegel, MPH, scientific director of surveillance research, American Cancer Society, Atlanta, Georgia, and colleagues report. There are approximately 2,629,200 fewer deaths from cancer now than would...

The optimization of standard therapy, novel drug combinations, and new targets for Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia are generating excitement, said Stephen Ansell, MD, PhD, from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.After the approval of ibrutinib (Imbruvica, Pharmacyclics and Janssen) for Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia in 2015, investigators began looking at other Bruton’s tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitors to determine which is the most effective and least toxic, he told Medscape Medical News. A phase 3, randomized, multicenter, open-label trial is currently comparing ibrutinib with the BTK inhibitor BGB-3111 in more than 200 patients (NCT03053440), said Ansell, who will talk about immunotherapy at the upcoming International...