AACR

As I mentioned in the last post, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) held its annual conference this past week in Denver. It's a huge conference -- about 17,000 people attend every year. They are devoted to rigorous scientific research on all types of cancer, though they seem to me to be a bit broader in what they encourage -- not just laboratory research, but also lots of public health stuff, too.

They're pretty accessible, too (unlike a lot of cancer research outfits), as far as letting people see their research abstracts. You can search online for what was presented at the conference at their abstracts page, which gives summaries of the research projects. There were over 100 presentations on lymphoma of various types (I don't know how many more than 100. That's where I stopped).

I thought I'd share a few of them.

(By the way, I can't link the summaries directly, so you'll need to search for them yourself on the abstracts page.)

One study looked at Follicular NHL in particular, focusing on 281 patients at a cancer treatment facility in Switzerland from 1980 to 2007. They broke the group up into three sub-groups, in 9 or 10 year intervals -- people diagnosed in the 80's, 90's, and 00's. They looked not just at Overall Survival (that is, at how long patients lived after diagnosis, no matter what they died from) but also at Cause-Specific Survival (people dying from fNHL specifically). As you might expect, they found that people in the earlier group (diagnosed in the 1980's) had a shorter CSS than those in the later groups. That's good news: people are living longer with fNHL than before, due to improvements in treatments. I suspect that the numbers will continue to improve -- they simply can't measure survival rates for those diagnosed since 2000. Not enough of them have died yet. (That's a good thing.)

OK, no one wants to think about survival rates (even when it's good news), so I'll give you something a little happier. Researchers from the Yale School of Public Health found that drinking wine helps NHL patients live longer. They looked at 546 female NHL patients over 12 years, and found that those who drink wine moderately had a longer Overall Survival, and a longer Disease-Free Survival (that is, a longer time between recurrences of lymphoma) than non-wine drinkers, and those who drank beer or hard alcohol. The effects of wine seemed to favor patients of the more aggressive DLBCL type of lymphoma, but that won't stop me from drinking more wine from now on.

Good news for those who aren't current NHL patients: those who had been drinking wine for 25 years or more before diagnosis had a 35% better Overall Survival rate after diagnosis. (Not that I'm wishing NHL on anyone, but it's a good excuse to drink some wine -- you know, just in case.)

And let me repeat that again for my brother: beer didn't have the same effect.

There are a couple more interesting abstracts from the conference that I'll share soon.