Does excess insulin lead to colon cancer?

Doctors meeting at Digestive Diseases Week 2004 considered whether insulin resistance might be one cause of colorectal cancer.

Obesity, starchy diets, and lack of exercise increase the risk of both diabetes and colorectal cancer. Insulin resistance often preceeds diagnosis of adult-onset diabetes.

Insulin resistance occurs when muscles do not respond normally to insulin and the pancreas responds by secreting even more insulin.

A study of patient records from the Overton Brooks VA Medical Center identified 9000 of nearly 50,000 people with diabetes -- about 18%. These diabetic patients were 32% more likely to have colon cancer than patients without diabetes. Alcohol and obesity were also risk factors for colon cancer in the analysis.

Dr. Ernest Hawk, chief of gastrointestinal cancer prevention at the National Cancer Institute, describes the insulin connection as "a compelling hypothesis" supported by "preliminary data but not definitive evidence."

Read an article in USATODAY

Download a PDF file from Digestive Disease Week -- Click on Studies Identify Risk Factors for Colon Cancer.

Yoga helps sleep in cancer patients.

Researchers at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center assigned people being treated for lymphoma either to an Tibetan Yoga group or a waiting list, which served as a control.

The 7-session yoga program included techniques of controlled breathing, visualization, mindfulness, and low-impact postures.

Eighty-nine percent of participants attended at least 3 sessions, and 58 percent attended 5 or more.

Compared to the patients on the waiting list, participants of the yoga program said that they slept better, went to sleep more quickly, and slept longer. They used less sleep medicine.

However, there were no significant differences between the two groups in terms of their reported worries. There also was no difference in depression or fatigue.

Lorenzo Cohen, Ph.D. reports the findings of his study group in in the May 15, 2004 issue of Cancer.

Read the abstract in Cancer

Doctors often underestimate nausea and vomiting that people being treated for cancer have at home.

Oncologists are usually accurate in predicting what nausea or vomiting their patients will have immediately after chemotherapy. However, in a study where patients were asked to keep diaries of their nausea in the days just after chemo treatments, more than 75% of their doctors underestimated how many would develop nausea and vomiting.

Depending on the drugs being used, the doctors thought that 20 to 40 percent of their patients would develop nausea and 15 to 25 percent would have vomiting.

In fact, according to the patient diaries, delayed nausea happened about 50 to 60 percent of the time and vomiting 28 to 50 percent.

Steven Grunberg of the University of Vermont led the study which was published in the May 15, 2004 issue of Cancer.

Read the Reuters article on Yahoo! Health

Read the abstract in Cancer.

No significant difference between open and laparoscopic colectomy.

Research over the past ten years shows little difference in survival whether people with colon cancer had open surgery or laparoscopy.

Although doctors had initially worried that there might be a greater risk of recurrence in the surgical wound, this proved not to be true.

Doctors randomly assigned 872 people with colon cancer to receive either traditional open colectomy or a laparoscopic procedure. After three years, 86 percent of laparoscopy patients and 85 percent of open colectomy patients were alive.

Cancer returned in 16 percent of laparoscopy and 18 percent of traditional open surgery patients.

Complications such as wound infections or bleeding happened in 21 percent of laparoscopic surgeries compared to 20 percent of traditional operations, an insignificant difference.

Laparoscopic patients had shorter hospital stays and required less narcotic and oral pain relief.

The Clinical Outcomes of Surgical Therapy Study Group published their results in the May 13, 2004 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Read an article in The New York Times

Read an article at the ACS News Center.

Read the study abstract in The New England Journal of Medicine.