Whole-brain radiotherapy should not be given routinely to all patients whose cancer has spread to the brain, say researchers who found that using it after surgery or radiosurgery in patients with a limited number of brain metastases and stable cancer in the rest of the body did not extend lives or help patients remain functionally independent for longer.

The largest study in the world of treatments for post menopausal, hormone positive breast cancer has shown that patients who continue to take exemestane or tamoxifen do significantly better than patients who start to take one or other drug (or tamoxifen followed exemestane) but then stop.

New research has found that switching post-menopausal women with early breast cancer to the drug exemestane (Aromasin) after two or three years of tamoxifen rather than keeping them on tamoxifen for five years improves the chance of remaining cancer free and reduces the risk of death for at least the next six years.

Women with mutations in either their BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes have a dramatically increased risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer. Identifying such women provides them with an opportunity to take preventive measures such as surgery to remove their breasts.

Medicare recipients with head and neck cancer commonly do not complete radiation therapy without interruptions or at all, according to a report in the September issue of Archives of Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Patients who have surgery before radiation treatment appear more likely to complete therapy, whereas those who have other illnesses or who have chemotherapy first may be more likely to experience interruptions or discontinuation in radiation treatment.

Cancer predisposition resulting from the presence of a specific gene variant shows a strong gender bias, researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have demonstrated.

New data on signalling proteins, called G proteins, may prove important in fighting diseases such as cardiovascular, neurodegenerative disorders, and cancer. For many decades scientists have puzzled on "How signalling proteins transport and organize in specific areas of the cell?" Researchers from Nano-Science Center and Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology at the University of Copenhagen provide yet unrecognized clues to solve this mystery.

deCODE genetics (Nasdaq: DCGN) today announced that a team of its scientists and academic colleagues from Finland, Spain, the Netherlands and the United States have today published the discovery of four novel single-letter variations in the sequence of the human genome (SNPs) conferring increased risk of prostate cancer. This is the sixth set of risk factors for prostate cancer that deCODE has found.