Bone Cancer: What Should You Be Aware Of?

Bone cancer is an uncommon form of the disease that begins in the bone itself. It can occur in any bone in the body, but usually affects the long bones which make up the arms and legs. There are several types of bone cancer, some of which primarily affect children and others which affect adults. The term bone cancer doesn’t actually include those which begin in other parts of the body and spread to the bone later on – it only relates to cancers which start in the bone. For the former, those cancers would take on the name of the area they began, such as breast cancer that has metastasized to the bone. It also doesn’t include blood cell cancers, such as leukemia, that begin in the bone marrow. The symptoms of bone cancer include fatigue, unintended weight loss, broken bones, bone pain, and swelling and tenderness in the affected area. If you have symptoms that are bothering you, you should speak to your GP as soon as possible. Researchers are still unsure what causes bone cancer, but they know that bone cancer begins as an error in the cells. This error informs the cell to grow and divide in an uncontrolled way which forms a tumour. There are thoughts that certain people are predisposed to develop this if it is a genetic problem in their family history.

There are several different types of bone cancer, which include osteosarcoma – this is the common form of cancer which develops in children and young adults. Chondrosarcoma begins in the cartilage cells and usually affects older adults. Ewing’s sarcoma is a less clear form of cancer, as researchers are unsure where it originates. This is also more common in children and young adults. Inherited genetic syndromes are thought to be one of the main causes of bone cancer, meaning that the genetic syndrome is passed down through families which increases the risk. Paget’s disease of the bone is a precancerous condition which increases the risk of bone cancer and is more common in adults.

You should be well prepared for your appointment if you are concerned about your risk of bone cancer – the more information you can provide your GP with, the better they can diagnose your condition. There will be a lot of ground to cover, so the more preparation you can do the better. Write down any personal information you can such as recent life changes or majorly stressful events that you’ve recently gone through. Your symptoms will be the biggest indicator, so write down a list of anything you’re experiencing, even if you think it might not be relevant – it could well be a symptom. You may want to take along a friend or family member for support, as there may be a lot of information to take in, so it might be useful to have someone to help you remember the details. You should also make a note of any medication that you’re currently taking as this could hinder any treatment or diagnosis. Bone cancer is less common than some other forms of cancer, but if it is caught early there can be a good rate of treatment success. The more aware you are of your body and what is normal for you, the better equipped you will be to spot the signs if something is wrong. If you’ve been experiencing the aforementioned symptoms for a few days without them dissipating, you should speak to your GP for advice.

Categories: adults, bone, Bone Cancer, cancer, include, Symptoms, young adults

Multiple Myeloma: Is Your Bone Wellness is at Risk?

Multiple myeloma is a major health concern, as it affects the plasma cells in your body. These are the white blood cells that make antibodies, but when the cancer gets involved, abnormal plasma cells accumulate in your bones and bone marrow. This can have a damaging impact on your wellbeing, since the bone marrow is your body’s source of blood cells, so multiple myeloma interferes with the production of blood cells, and can lead to the development of bone lesions.

 

The problem with this type of cancer is that different varieties affect your wellness in different ways, and so some types are more recognisable than others. Indolent myeloma, for example, has no discernable symptoms. As it only develops slowly and does not cause bone tumours, the only things that may be seen are small increases in M plasma cells and M protein, which is an abnormal type of antibody found in myeloma patients. Solitary plasmocytoma, on the other hand, does involve a tumour which is usually found in one of your bones. This kind of multiple myeloma tends to respond well to treatment, but your doctor will have to monitor it closely.

 

As it stands, wellness experts are unsure as to what exactly causes multiple myeloma, but they do know that it begins with one abnormal plasma cell. When this cell multiplies in your bone marrow, it does so far more times than it should and – instead of multiplying and dying out like non-cancerous cells – it keeps dividing indefinitely. As a result, your body can become overwhelmed and start impairing the production of your healthy cells.

 

There aren’t many clear risk factors for multiple myeloma, but there are a few to watch out for:

 

1. Being over the age of 50 (although you’ll likely be diagnosed in your early to mid 60s)

2. Being male

3. Being of African origin

4. Being overweight or obese

5. Exposure to radiation

6. Having a job in the petroleum industry

7. Having a history of monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS). At least 1% of people with MGUS will also develop multiple myeloma every year.

Categories: abnormal plasma, blood cells, bone, Bone Cancer, Bone Marrow, cells, multiple, multiple myeloma, myeloma, plasma cells

The Eight Osteoporosis Facts that Every Woman Needs to Know

Osteoporosis is a major concern, especially for women over the age of 50. However, this disease can be deadly, and so it is essential you make yourself aware about eight important facts related to osteoporosis, no matter your age.

 

1. You need to discuss bone health with your doctor: Even if you’re still in your 20s or 30s, you should be concerned about bone wellness as the earlier you start, the easier it will be to prevent osteoporosis.

 

2. Smoking does more to your wellbeing than causing cancer: Smoking can make your bones become thinner, which increases your risk of fractures and, in turn, osteoporosis.

 

3. Exercise is essential for good bone health: If you get the recommended levels of exercise, you can reduce your risk of osteoporosis. However, overdoing it will put too much strain on your bones, so consult a doctor or look online for the best plan for you. Weight training and muscle bearing exercises can help prevent the loss of bone mass, while aerobic exercises strengthen your bones and connect tissues.

 

4. Calcium is not just for kids: You may be concerned about the fat content in milk, but this is all in vain. Milk actually aids weight loss as well as improving your bone density, so eat three dairy products a day, or drink two glasses of milk, to get your recommended 1200mg of calcium.

 

5. Be wary of menopause: As soon as your body reaches menopause, it stops producing oestrogen. As this hormone is vital for strong and healthy bones, you need to strengthen and maintain them while you still can.

 

6. Medicines can help, but watch out for side effects: Raloxifene, Biphosphonates and Calcitoni are great osteoporosis treatments, but Raloxifene has been known to worsen hot flashes in post-menopausal women and Biphosphonates can give you runny or constipated stomach.

 

7. It’s good to have heavy bones: The higher your bone density, the less risk you have of osteoporosis, so get a test to find out your risk factor. It is quick, non-invasive and absolutely painless.

 

8. There’s no quick fix or magic cure: As it stands, there’s no reliable cure for osteoporosis. This means that prevention is your best bet.

Categories: bone, bone density, bone health, bones, calcium, exercise, nbsp, osteoporosis, osteoporosis nbsp, risk

Yoga: Putting Practice into Osteoporosis

The so-called “fairer sex” has it rough.

If it isn’t an insatiable cocktail of monthly cycles and hormonal tidal waves, it’s the mere process of ageing that catches up with you. Of course, each person is different and therefore, the levels of effects are consistently varied. One of these effects is the possibility of osteoporosis.

Osteoporosis is the thinning of bones that can lead to them becoming brittle and fractured if left alone. It can be a painful process, with one in three women over 50 years old suffering from resulting bone fractures.

Common reasons as to why osteoporosis happens are factors such as age, low body weight and smoking.

Does that mean having to cut that well-earned, trim waist?

Far from it.

With the simple application of yoga into your schedule, the risks of osteoporosis occurring – or worsening – are outdone significantly according do Dr. Loren Fishman, a medical director at Manhattan Physical Medicine.

According to the Huffington Post, Dr. Fishman commented that, following extensive research on the benefits of yoga for osteoporosis, “I know [yoga] can help because I’ve done the studies. […] “We did a bone mineral density (DEXA) scan, then we taught half of them the yoga, waited two years, and did another scan. And not only did these people not lose bone, they gained bone. The ones who didn’t do the yoga lost a little bone, as you would expect.”

These safe and effective methods take the stress out of your bones; by practising yoga, you maintain a healthy balance of physical and mental health without compromising your health. By thickening the density of your bones, you will find that you will be able to do more without the fear of harming yourself.

Tweak your lifestyle and add a little extra strength to your body. You might surprise yourself.

Yoga: Putting Practice into Osteoporosis

Categories: bone, bone conditions, bones, density, joints and bones, osteoporosis, yoga

How to Protect Your Teeth From The Effects of Osteoporosis

If you suffer from arthritis or osteoporosis, you are probably well aware of the effect that your condition has on your joints and bones. What you may not be aware of, however, is the damage that these conditions can also do to the wellbeing of your teeth.

To this end, it is extremely important that you do everything in your power to make sure that you protect the wellness of your teeth by doing everything possible to keep them immaculate, strong and healthy.

Any treatment for osteoporosis should include a dental overview so that your physician is aware of the state of bones in your entire body, including those in your jaw. A thorough dental evaluation is really important before you even consider starting a treatment course for osteoporosis (either through IV or an oral course of treatment).

The bones in your body are constantly being broken down and then being built back up again. The medications that are commonly prescribed for osteoporosis are designed to stop bones breaking down, which is a great thing in terms of halting the disease, but can affect the normal performance of bone. Bisphosphonates in particular can cause problems with bone healing, so a visit to the dentist is extremely advisable if you have been recommended this course of treatment.

If you already take medication for osteoporosis and have not yet had a dental review, the best idea is to book in for a quick bone test, which will allow your dentist to check your teeth and see what kind of state the bone is in, as well as assessing whether your current medication is suitable for your oral health.

This is usually done with a morning fasting serum CTX test, which measures how well your bones are repairing themselves. If there are found to be problems, you could opt to take a break from your medication and then re-test, if your health care provider feels that is appropriate.

How to Protect Your Teeth From The Effects of Osteoporosis

Categories: Arthritis, bone, bones, osteoporosis, teeth, treatment

Researchers Make Remarkable Bone Cancer Discovery

cancer/">Bone cancer is a complicated problem with shocking statistics. Of those whose wellbeing is affected by cancer/">bone cancer, 20% die every year. In the UK alone, bone and connective tissue cancer killed more than a thousand people in 2008.

You could argue that where wellness experts were with cancer-female/">breast cancer in the 1990s is where they are with the treatment of cancer/">bone cancer today. The standard treatment is chondrosarcoma which is restricted to removal of the affected part as they are resistant to chemo and radiotherapy. However, with advances in scientific research, and the support of organisations like Cancer Research UK, The Wellcome Trust, and Macmillan Cancer Support, the fight against cancer/">bone cancer has gathered momentum in recent times, helping to dramatically improve survival rates.

In the 1970s, roughly 50% of women with cancer-female/">breast cancer survived the disease beyond five years, but now more than 80% do. The problem with cancer research is that studies into the rarer diseases, such as sarcoma, depend heavily on small charities such as Skeletal Action Cancer Trust, cancer/">Bone Cancer Research Trust and Sarcoma UK. A large portion of these charities’ funding comes from patients and their families and friends.

Researchers at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital (RNOH) have been working on a research project to understand more about cancer/">bone cancer. The investigators’ findings could soon allow them to develop specific treatments for hundreds of patients with one of the more common forms of the disease. 90 of the 400 cases of primary cancer/">bone cancer in the UK each year are chondrosarcomas, which is the second most common type of cancer/">bone cancer. This cancer of the cartilage has been discovered to contain an IDH1 or IDH2 mutation in 50-65% of cases.

As a result of this understanding, the RNOH experts can develop specific drugs which could change the way you’re treated for cancer/">bone cancer in the future. The benefits of this ground-breaking research was recently recognised, as the team were awarded the Jeremy Jass Prize for Research Excellence in Pathology. The team is now working with the pharmaceutical company Agios and they hope that clinical trials will begin in the near future.

Researchers Make Remarkable Bone Cancer Discovery

Categories: bone, Bone Cancer, breast cancer, cancer, cancer research, develop specific, Mutation, Research, trust

Could a Simple CT Scan Be Used to Detect Osteoporosis?

There may be a bonus benefit to your run-of-the-mill abdominal CT scan – it could check if your wellbeing has been affected by osteoporosis. This is according to a new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which found that CT scans give fairly similar results to dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), which is traditionally used to diagnose the bone-weakening disease.

According to the study’s lead author Dr. Perry Pickhardt, professor of radiology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, ‘What we found is that there is pretty good correlation.’ The researchers explained that this could allow doctors to use patients’ CT scans that are ordered for another reason – such as looking for tumours – to also check for signs of osteoporosis. This could spare you from having unnecessary additional testing, which can become very costly to whoever’s footing the bill.

However, wellness experts gave a warning in an editorial accompanying the study; using CT scans to gauge bone density could lead to you being incorrectly diagnosed, particularly if you are at low risk and get tested. Dr. Sumit Majumdar, a professor of medicine at the University of Alberta in Canada, commented that CT scans are better tests, but stomach scans don’t include the hip, whereas a DXA would.

Yet Pickhardt and his colleagues argue that DXA scans, whilst safe and cost effective, are often underused. CT scans, on the other hand, are thought to be, if anything, overused. In the US, where the study took place, more than 80 million CT scans were performed during 2011. For the new study, the researchers looked at the test results of 1,867 patients, who had both types of scans performed within six months of each other over a 10-year period. Of the 23% of people who had developed osteoporosis, roughly 45% were diagnosed with some bone-weakening and about 32% were healthy based on their DXAs.

Dr. Beatrice Hull, from the Center for Osteoporosis and Bone Health at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, commented that a CT scan won’t remove the need for a DXA scan. Hull, who wasn’t involved with the new research, said, ‘I don’t think at this point this one test is going to prevent further testing. I think it will identify patients who are at a higher risk and need more testing.’

Could a Simple CT Scan Be Used to Detect Osteoporosis?

Categories: bone, bone weakening, ct scan, ct scans, osteoporosis, Research, scan, scans, study

Vitamin E Supplements Could be Bad for Bone Health

Daily supplements are generally regarded as a good thing, providing people with the vitamins and minerals they may be missing. However, new research suggests a daily supplement of vitamin E puts you at risk of thinning of the bones.

A Japanese study linked a compound in vitamin E to osteoporosis, the degenerative bone condition, where bone thins or breaks down more quickly than it can be replaced. Researchers from Keoi University discovered that taking alpha-tocopherol vitamin E supplements can quickly reduce bone mass.

Lab tests were carried out on rats and mice to reveal that alpha-tocopherol, which is the most common form of vitamin E, kickstarts bone-degrading cells by releasing low levels of “resorption”. Resorption is the process of breaking down and recycling bone minerals to regenerate the bones. Instead of increasing resorption to break the bones down effectively, alpha-tocopherol vitamin E thins the bones instead.

Their laboratory experiments used mice with low levels of vitamin E. Those mice had grown excessively thick bones because their bodies could not break down the old bone through resorption and so new, healthy bones could not be formed.

The team gave the mice doses of alpha-tocpherol vitamin E supplements equivalent to the doses taken by humans and after eight weeks, the mice showed a 20% reduction in bone mass. Mice given the less common form of vitamin E, delta-tocopherol, did not show the same effects.

Vitamin E is known for its powerful antioxidant properties, for its anti-ageing qualities and ability to protect against heart disease, stroke and cancer. However, the evidence of the Japanese study may give some people who take it as a supplement pause for thought, particularly older women most likely to be affected by osteoporosis.

The Japanese study, reported in the journal Nature Medicine, has called for a larger study into the potential effects of vitamin E on bone mass.

Google+
Vitamin E Supplements Could be Bad for Bone Health

Categories: alpha tocopherol, bone, bone mass, bones, common form, japanese study, Supplements, tocopherol vitamin, vitamin, vitamin e