Cancer Patients Need Answers Now!

I read a sad editorial in the Los Angeles Times written by Laurie Becklund, former LA Times journalist. It is, in essence, a self-written obituary as the patient describes her saga beginning almost 19 years earlier, when she detected a lump in her breast. With stage I breast cancer she underwent standard therapy and remained well for 13 years until recurrence was heralded by disease in bone, liver, lung and brain. Given a dire prognosis she became a self-made expert, conducting research, attending conferences, and joining on-line forums under the name “Won’t Die of Ignorance.” Despite her heroic effort Ms. Becklund succumbed to her illness on February 8. She was 66.

Ms. Becklund experienced the anguish that every patient feels when his or her own individual and highly personal needs simply aren’t being addressed. She opines that entities like the Susan G. Komen Fund, which has raised over $2.5 billion in the last 20 years, “channels only a fraction of those funds into research or assistance to help those who are already seriously sick.” She continues, “We need people, patients, doctors, scientists, politicians, industry and families to make a fresh start.” Her frustration is palpable as she states her outcome seemed to be based on the roll of the dice, like playing “Chutes and Ladders.”

The author’s plight is shared by the millions of patients who are confronting advanced cancers. They are not interested in “why” or “how” their cancers came to be. They can no longer benefit from early detection or cancer awareness campaigns. They need practical, actionable, clinical answers today.

Ms. Becklund’s commentary resonates with me and with everyone who has cancer or knows someone who does. As an oncology fellow at Georgetown, I found myself losing patient after patient to toxic and largely ineffective treatments, all despite my best efforts. I described this in my book “Outliving Cancer.” It was then that I decided that I would dedicate myself to meeting the individual needs of each of my patients and I have used a laboratory platform (EVA-PCD) to do so. I have encountered surprising resistance from clinicians and researchers who seem to prefer the glacial pace of incremental advancement found in population studies over individual solutions found in the study of each patient’s unique biology. Ms. Becklund correctly points out that every treatment must meet each individual’s need.

The role of the scientist is to answer a question (treatment A vs. treatment B) while that of the clinical physician must be to save a life. Every patient is an experiment in real time. It may well be that no two cancer patients are the same. Indeed, the complexity of carcinogenesis makes it very possible that every patient’s cancer is an entirely new disease, never before encountered. Although cancers may look alike, they may be biologically quite distinct. Meaningful advances in cancer will only occur when we learn to apply all available technologies to treat patients as the individuals that they are. Let us hope that Ms. Becklund’ s final essay does not fall upon deaf ears.

Mammography – The Evolving Story of a Diagnostic Tool

The use of low-dose radiation to detect occult breast malignancies can be traced to work done at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in the 1950s. Early published studies conducted by the “Egan technique,” correctly identified the majority of palpable cancers subsequently proven malignant at the time of surgery. As a diagnostic tool, mammography is an effective means of confirming the presence, and defining the extent, of breast pathology in woman at high risk for cancer, or who note a palpable lump. No one is arguing the diagnostic use of this technique. Where the controversy has arisen over the last years is the use of mammography as a screening technique.

To clarify the use of terminology, screening techniques are applied to the general population to identify unrecognized disease. The popularity of mammography as a screening technique led to the recommendation that every woman over 40 should have an annual mammogram. The problem with screening techniques is that they apply a diagnostic tool to a population at low risk. This burdens the technology with numerous false positives, engendering  costs, risks, and toxicity for those who undergo unnecessary biopsies and surgery. The entire discussion came into sharper focus in the past week with the publication of a large Canadian study that examined the impact of mammographic screening over a 25-year follow up in women ages 40-59.

In this study, launched in 1980, more than 89,000 women were divided into two groups. One group underwent routine physical examination and the second group had routine physical examination combined with mammogram. There were 3,250 diagnoses of cancer in the 44,925 women who underwent mammography and 3,133 cancers diagnosed in the 44,910 women who underwent physical examination alone. Five hundred patients in the mammography group and 505 women in the control group died of their disease. While women who had mammograms were more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer, this did not have an impact on their risk of dying from the disease. Furthermore, 22 percent of women with positive mammograms did not have cancer at definitive workup. The conclusion of paper and the accompanying editorial by Mette Kalager from Oslo, Norway, was that ”the rationale for screening by mammography needed to be urgently reassessed.”

What are the shortcomings of the study? Mammographers have claimed that the equipment used was suboptimal, leading to less sensitive detection that might have occurred with modern, high-quality digital equipment. There was also no group over 60. It is also theoretically possible that some patients obtained mammography after concluding the study, or had mammograms done during the study, contaminating the final results. Nonetheless, this is a high quality randomized study in a large population that fails to provide an impact upon survival for a widely used technique.

Prior meta-analyses conducted between the 1960s and 1980s revealed a reduction in deaths in breast cancer between 15 percent and 25 percent in the population of women age 50 to 69. Explanations for the disparity between the current study and those older studies may include the relative lack of sophistication of the population during the 1960s through 1980s, who might fail to evaluate a breast lump, thus, earlier detection would have a significant impact on those not responding to even physical evidence of disease.

A second confounding variable is the broad use of Tamoxifen, which has so profoundly influenced the natural history of breast cancer, that the earlier detection of breast cancer may be less important than the potent efficacy of anti-hormonal agents. This is an interesting wrinkle in the story, as it is contrary to most contemporary thinking that holds that early detection, not treatment is the principal influence upon better outcomes today.

So where does this study leave us?  There are several points that must be considered. The first is that mammography is a test not a treatment. Tests perform according to their performance characteristics, described as “sensitivity and specificity.” Within this framework mammograms are sensitive and specific enough to provide immense value ….in the right patient population, e.g. those at some risk for the disease in question. How you define that “risk” is the rub.

Mammograms identify the disease; they do not influence its biology. While some may demand that more sensitive equipment for the detection of disease be implemented, a different principle may underlie the findings. This would be that cancer, at virtually any stage of diagnosis, is a systemic disease with its own trajectory. Under this scenario, mammograms in an unselected population provide little more than a lead-time bias. This term is applied when a test identifies an event earlier than it might have been found, but has no impact on the ultimate outcome. Lead-time bias is a common phenomenon in screening techniques and has been the rallying cry for those who argue against PSA screening for men. Once again, the number of patients diagnosed versus the number of patients requiring intervention is the overarching dilemma.

While we seek to decipher the genetic basis of cancer using increasingly sophisticated genomic techniques, we recognize that cancer is common and that a substantial percentage of patients may not die of their disease. Cancer results from stresses that force cells to either die or seek novel mechanisms to survive. Deprived of estrogen, testosterone, nutrients, oxygen or growth factors, cells within the aging human body discover novel ways to stay alive, albeit to the detriment of the organism as a whole. However humbling, it can be argued, that it is pathways that aberrant cells pursue that guides the trajectory of the disease, largely independent of our roles as diagnosticians and treating physicians.

Nut Consumption, Pancreatic Cancer and Woody Allen

In the 1973 Woody Allen movie ”Sleeper,” Miles Monroe (played by Allen), is the nerdy owner of the Happy Carrot health food store who undergoes cryostasis (deep freeze) only to be awakened 200 years later. He finds himself in a place where all that he had come to know has disappeared. Two physicians observing him from a distance comment on his unusual dietary request: wheat germ, organic honey and tiger’s milk. Puzzled, one physician asks why he would want such odd foods. The second physician explains that 200 years earlier, low fat foods were considered healthy. “What, no deep fat, no steak, no cream pies, or hot fudge?” she asks incredulously. “No”, he explains, “those were thought to be unhealthy…. precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.”

I was reminded of this scene by a paper published in the British Journal of Cancer (BJC). Based on observations from 75,680 women in the Nurses’ Health Study, investigators showed that the regular consumption of nuts was inversely associated with the risk of pancreatic cancer. Indeed, those who consumed one ounce of almonds, Brazil nuts, cashews, hazelnuts, macadamias, pecans, pine nuts, pistachios or walnuts, three times per week had a 35 percent reduction in the risk of pancreatic cancer (P = 0.007). This was found to be independent of age, height, obesity, smoking, diabetes, or other dietary factors. Although the study was funded by the International Tree Nut Council Nutrition Research and Education Foundation, they had no participation in the design or analysis of the data.

The consumption of nuts has previously been shown to be highly beneficial. In a Spanish study of 7,000 people, ages 55 to 90, those who ate three servings per week had a 55 percent reduction in death from cardiovascular disease and a 40 percent reduction in death from cancer. Clearly, the association between nut consumption and health is both strong and broad based, as it extends from cardiovascular disease to cancer.

The majority of the calories in nuts come from lipids (fats) including monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats like oleic acid, found in olive oil, linoleic, gamma-linolenic and alpha-linolenic acids as well as the saturated fats, stearic and palmitic acids. Of the nuts commonly consumed the highest lipid content is in macadamia nut, followed by peanuts, pecans, cashews, walnuts, pine nuts, hazel nuts, pistachios, almonds and chestnuts. The protein content of nuts favors peanuts and pine nuts. A number of micronutrients are also found in nuts including flavonoids, stilbenes, proanthocyanidins, calcium, iron, B6 and magnesium.

The BJC study stands in strong contradistinction to the oft-repeated admonition that nuts should be avoided, as voiced for many years by health experts and dieticians. The fat avoidance craze of recent decades held that foods containing lipids were to be eschewed. Health conscious individuals were encouraged to eat grains and carbohydrates.

Today we recognize the important benefits of lipids and find that higher fat and high protein diets are gaining traction over the older food pyramid. We now find that high carbohydrate intake may in part be responsible for many contemporary maladies suggesting that the agrarian revolution of 10,000 years ago that made high calorie/low fiber grains readily available may ultimately prove to have been more a curse than a blessing.

An expert is one whose “faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely” is recognized and granted sway over society. But who judges the experts? The current BJC study suggests that in many fields of science and medicine the experts can be wrong. How many people denied themselves the pleasure and, we now come to learn, the health benefits of nuts based upon expert recommendations?

In our contemporary diagnosis and management of cancer, might the experts be leading us astray in other areas? Perhaps we should all ponder that point as we nibble on a few Macadamia nuts.

Garlic – The Common Man’s Cure All

A recent study published in the Journal of Cancer Prevention Research by investigators in China compared the outcome of patients with lung cancer who consumed fresh garlic against those who did not. In the study of 1,424 lung cancer patients there was a 44 percent reduction of the risk of lung cancer for non-smokers.  Even among smoking patients the risk of lung cancer was reduced by 30 percent.

The findings of the study are consistent with a treatise that I published several years ago on garlic (Garlic: Medicinal Food or Nutritious Medicine? Robert A. Nagourney, Journal of Medicinal Food, 1998). In this study, I examined the history of garlic, as well as its chemistry and its medicinal properties. In addition to its anti-cancer properties, garlic is antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, lowers blood pressure, reduces the risk of blood clots, lowers cholesterol and may serve as an anti-aging nutrient.

Where the recent study struck chord was its concordance with my strong recommendation from that 1998 article that we consume fresh garlic over the other preparations. The aged garlic extracts, dried garlic and garlic oil preparations lack the most important chemical constituent of all – allicin. Allicin, also known diallyl disulphide oxide (2-propanethiol sufinate) imparts the characteristic odor to garlic. It is only formed when the precursor alliin is enzymatically converted to the allicin via the action of the enzyme alliinase. Once allicin is exposed to excess heat or oxygen it undergoes a variety of conversions that lead to diallyl sulfone as well the diallyl di, tri, and tetra sulfides.

These compounds, though biologically active, do not carry the potency of allicin. It is for this reason that I have, over the past two decades, urged my patients, family and friends to consume fresh garlic as a foodstuff. Indeed as I write in my book, Outliving Cancer, our family consumes the equivalent 2 – 3 liters of fresh garlic a month.

The history of garlic as a medicinal is indeed rich. And it was Gallen, in 130 AD, who described it as “Theriacum rusticorum” (the common man’s cure all). I am pleased that two millennia later Chinese cancer researchers have provided additional data to support his prescient observation.