Recently, the US Food and Drug Administration approved a first-of-its-kind cancer therapy to treat aggresive forms of skin cancer. It has us thinking of the long history of cancer. One of the first recorded mentions of cancer appears in an ancient Egyptian text from around 3000 B.C.
And although we now know much more about how cancer— as a series of mutations in someone's DNA — it's a disease people are still grappling with how to cure cancers today. This episode, cancer epidemiologisttalks about cancer history and treatment today — plus, why some people are more prone to certain cancers and why that might matter for curing them.from around 3000 B.C.
Chemotherapy came several decades later, in the mid-1900s. It gave doctors a way to kill cancer cells that surgery or radiation couldn't reach. The idea was that certain drugs targeted dividing cells — a hallmark of cancer cells. But she adds that she doesn't want the message to sound so gloomy."It's not like we're doomed; just because you get old, you will have cancer. I think a lot of it can be modified by paying attention to these other factors that we know cause cancer and are correlated with age because they accumulate over time."In recent years, cancer survival has gone up — in part because researchers and clinicians are turning toward more personalized treatment approaches.
"This introduces a disparity because a lot of the drug therapies have been designed among patients of European background," Stern says, and adds,"if we don't consider that, we may not be treating them with the best drugs that those tumors are going to respond to."
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