Levels of hormones affecting the efficiency of cervical cancer medicine

New class of anticancer drugs may cause endometrial cancer that regulate growth hormone environment known as PARP inhibitors are sensitive substantially, UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center researcher shows for the first time. Could lead to novel one-to-punch therapy to fight cancer of the endometrium survey offers particularly sophisticated is disease, limited effectiveness of conventional treatment for alternative options.

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French islands under threat from rising sea levels

Sep. 17, 2013 — By the year 2100, global warming will have caused sea levels to rise by 1 to 3 meters. This will strongly affect islands, their flora, fauna and inhabitants. A team of researchers from the Ecologie, systematique et evolution (CNRS/Universite Paris-Sud) laboratory studied the impact of rising sea levels on 1,269 French islands throughout the world. Their model shows that between 5% and 12% of these islands could be totally submerged in the future. On a worldwide scale, they predict that about 300 endemic island species are at risk of extinction, while the habitat of thousands of others will be drastically reduced.

This research has been published in the journals Global Ecology and Biogeography (August 2013) and Nature Conservation (September 2013).

The most recent predictions of global warming show that sea levels will rise by between 1 and 3 meters before the end of the century. In some scenarios involving a catastrophic breaking-up of Greenland ice, sea levels are expected to rise by 6 meters. Any such increase will have serious consequences for the populations, flora and fauna of the coastal strip.

The researchers at the Ecologie, systematique et evolution laboratory first concentrated on the effects rising sea levels would have on French islands. Throughout the world, 2,050 French islands of more than a hectare are likely to have animal and plant communities.

The scientists compared the terrain contours of 1,269 of these islands with sea level models, taking into account the fact that sea levels will not rise evenly over the Earth's surface because the sea is not flat: some areas of the ocean will rise higher than others. Results showed that, even if sea levels only rose by one meter, France would lose 6% of its islands (12% in the case of a 3-meter rise). French Polynesia and New Caledonia would be the worst affected: two thirds of the islands that would be submerged are in these archipelagos. There are French islands in all of the world's oceans, at all latitudes and with many different types of geology and ecology. Extrapolating their results to the 180,000 islands in the world, the scientists believe that the Earth could lose 10,000 to 20,000 islands before 2100.

The researchers went on to look at the biodiversity loss that could result from sea-level rise, notably in certain biodiversity hotspots such as the Mediterranean, the Philippines and New Caledonia. Twenty percent of the world's biodiversity is found on islands, including a very large proportion of endemic species.

The Philippines, Indonesia and the Caribbean are the most vulnerable areas: at least 300 endemic species, mostly plants, are seriously threatened by rising sea levels. Yet even this figure is a conservative estimate, as the researchers only considered species whose distribution areas would be totally submerged by 2100. They did not include the species that would lose 70%, 80% or even 90% of their natural range, nor additional factors such as lateral erosion or centennial tides, which can make large expanses of the coastal strip inhospitable for many species. Neither did they include natural disasters like cyclones.

This work shows how much of a threat rising sea levels pose to the biodiversity of island ecosystems, highlighting the necessity to take account of the consequences of this unstoppable process in designing policies for the conservation and protection of endangered species.

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Dieting May Lower Hormone Levels Tied to Breast Cancer

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

MONDAY, May 21 (HealthDay News) -- New research suggests that weight loss through exercise and dieting helps overweight women lower the levels of certain hormones in their blood, potentially raising the odds that they'll avoid developing breast cancer.

The findings don't prove that losing weight this way will prevent breast cancer. Still, women who take medications to prevent the disease "need long-term solutions for managing their risk," study co-author Dr. Anne McTiernan, director of the Prevention Center at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, said in a news release from the center.

"Weight loss represents an additional option for long-term breast cancer risk reduction without significant or bothersome side effects," McTiernan added.

The study is published in the May 21 online issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Previous research at the center has suggested that "losing just 5 percent or more of one's weight could cut by a quarter to a half the risk for the most common, estrogen-sensitive breast cancers," McTiernan said.

In the new study, researchers wanted to understand how weight loss through exercise, diet or both would affect potentially dangerous levels of hormones in the body.

The investigators randomly assigned 439 overweight-to-obese women to one of four groups. One group exercised (mainly through walking), one group dieted, one group did both and the remaining group did neither. The women were aged 50 to 75 with an average age of 58.

Those who dieted or dieted and exercised lost an average of about 10 percent of their weight. In addition, they lowered the levels of several hormones.

"The amount of weight lost was key to changes in hormone levels," McTiernan said. "The biggest effect was through diet plus exercise; exercise by itself didn't produce much of a change in weight or estrogen."

Dr. Robert Hiatt, professor and chair of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, cautioned that weight loss has been connected to breast cancer risk after menopause only. "In this stage of a woman's life, most of the circulating estrogens are no longer coming from the ovaries, which cease to function, but from fat tissue that is capable of producing the same types of estrogens," said Hiatt, who's familiar with the study findings.

He cautioned that "the study does not say that losing weight lowers the risk of breast cancer. It would take a larger and longer study to prove that. It does, however, suggest than weight loss has the right kind of effect on circulating estrogens, and it would be reasonable to expect that breast cancer rates would subsequently fall in such women."

More information

For more on breast cancer, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

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