MONDAY, Feb. 1 (HealthDay News) -- Long-term survival rates are similar for leukemia patients who've had either peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) or bone marrow transplants, a new European study says.

The study began with 329 leukemia patients who received either PBSC or bone marrow transplants from a matched sibling donor between 1995 and 1999. Detailed information was collected on all the patients who survived longer than three years after their transplant.

Ten years after transplantation, 49.1 percent of PBSC recipients and 56.5 percent of bone marrow transplant recipients were still alive. Chronic graft versus host disease was more common among PBSC transplant patients (73 percent) than among bone marrow transplant patients (54 percent), and more PBSC recipients needed immunosuppressive treatment five years after transplantation (26 percent vs. 12 percent). But this did not affect the PBSC recipients' general health status or their ability to return to work, the study found.

The researchers also noted a trend toward improved, but not statistically significant, leukemia-free survival and overall survival after bone marrow transplant in patients with acute leukemias. Among patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, 10-year leukemia-free survival probability was 28.3 percent in the bone marrow transplant group, compared with 13 percent in the PBSC transplant group.

In patients with acute myeloid leukemia, the rates were 62.3 percent for bone marrow transplant and 47.1 percent for PBSC transplant. For patients with chronic myeloid leukemia, the rates were 40.2 percent for bone marrow transplant and 48.5 percent for PBSC transplant.

"This update comparing two important stem cell sources did not find differences in survival after 10-year follow-up. However, subgroup analyses did reveal notable differences in survival in patients with acute leukemias between those who received allogeneic blood cells and those who received bone marrow, while no differences were seen in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia, the researchers wrote.

"Our observations support previous reports that different patient groups might still benefit from transplantation with bone marrow," they concluded.

The study was published online Jan. 31 in The Lancet Oncology.

More information

The U.S. National Cancer Institute has more about leukemia.

MONDAY, Feb. 1 (HealthDay News) -- Men with prostate cancer and the physicians who treat them are being warned that the androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) commonly used against the malignancy might increase the risk of heart attack and cardiac death.

"There is a substantial amount of data demonstrating that ADT adversely affects traditional cardiovascular risk factors, including serum lipoproteins, insulin sensitivity and obesity," according to an advisory published online Feb. 1 in Circulation by a group of experts from the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society and the American Urological Association.

The warning is guarded, saying that risks have not been found in all studies. "But we think that physicians treating patients with localized and metastatic prostate cancers as well as patients ought to realize that there are significant risks associated with the use of hormone therapy," said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.

ADT reduces or eliminates the male hormones that can promote growth of prostate cancer. About one-third of all men with prostate cancer are given ADT, Brawley noted.

"Many people underestimate the harm of hormonal therapy and overestimate the potential benefits of hormonal therapy," he said.

Six studies -- two done in Europe, four in the United States -- have shown increased incidence of cardiovascular problems in men, Brawley said.

One U.S. study of 37,000 men treated for prostate cancer at Veterans Affairs hospitals found a 27 percent increased risk for heart disease among those given multiple hormone-blocking agents. Surgical removal of the testes was associated with a 40 percent increased risk for heart disease and a more than doubled risk for a heart attack.

"These drugs do have usefulness," Brawley said. But there has been debate about whether ADT should be used in some cases, such as when levels of prostate-specific antigen (PSA), a cancer-associated protein, begin to go up but there are no other signs and symptoms of cancer progression, he said.

"A man has had radical prostatectomy [cancer surgery] and PSA starts rising again," Brawley said. "There has been a debate in the medical profession: Should we start hormonal therapy or just watch it go up and act only if we see the cancer spreading?"

More research is needed to determine the proper course of action in these and other cases where the course of the disease is not clear, the new advisory said.

Meanwhile, "the American Cancer Society is advising that physicians be aware that all hormone therapies for prostate cancer can have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes and death," Brawley said. "They can be useful in treatment but should be used with caution."

A need for caution was also emphasized by Dr. Arthur Sagalowsky, a professor of urology and chief of urologic oncology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and one of two urologists representing the American Urological Association on the panel that produced the advisory.

"One needs to be very careful in not overdrawing conclusions beyond what the panel has done," Sagalowsky said.

The risk for cardiac problems should be one of many issues discussed in the treatment of prostate cancer, he said. "It adds to the body of information that I present to patients with prostate cancer when they decide whether or if to begin androgen-deprivation therapy," he said. "How one decides will depend on the circumstances of the patient's prostate cancer, and this individual side effect is one of the issues that enter into the discussion."

More information

The U.S. National Cancer Institute has more on prostate cancer.

FRIDAY, Jan. 29 (HealthDay News) -- The first complete genomic sequencing of a brain cancer cell line has been performed by U.S. scientists.

The achievement may help identify new molecular targets for the development of more effective and less toxic drugs and lead to personalized treatments based on the unique biological signatures of a patient's cancer, according to the team at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The finding also may result in new and better ways to monitor for brain cancer recurrence, as well as a test to determine when brain cancer has been destroyed, which would prevent overtreatment with harmful anti-cancer drugs that can cause long-term health problems.

The sequencing was done on a glioblastoma cell line called U87, which is studied in more than 1,000 laboratories worldwide. The UCLA team used this thoroughly examined brain cancer cell line because the sequencing of its genome will allow scientists who've studied it to reinterpret their findings and perhaps move in new research directions.

According to the report published in the Jan. 29 online edition of the journal PLoS Genetics, with the latest technology, the sequencing of the brain cancer cell line took less than a month and cost about $35,000.

"This is very exciting because we, as scientists, can now move forward with revealing complete cancer genomes," study senior author Dr. Stan Nelson, a professor of human genetics and director of the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center's Gene Expression Shared Resource, said in a news release.

"Cancer is at its heart a genetic disease. Cancer cells have acquired mutations that allow them to invade tissues and to not live by the normal rules. The changes from normal (mutations) that have given the cancer these special properties are encoded in DNA, and the entire DNA sequence has just been too complex and costly to decode until now," Nelson said.

More information

The American Cancer Society has more about brain tumors  .

FRIDAY, Jan. 29 (HealthDay News) -- New ways of identifying and studying cancer stem cells in the lab could accelerate understanding of the cells and lead to the development of drugs that target them, British researchers say.

"Cancer stem cells drive the growth of a tumor. If we could target treatments against these cells specifically, we should be able to eradicate the cancer completely," Dr. Trevor Yeung, of Oxford University's Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, said in a university news release.

"Radiotherapy and chemotherapy work against all rapidly dividing cells," he explained. "But there is increasing evidence that cancer stem cells are more resistant than other cells to this treatment. Cancer stem cells that have not been eradicated can lead to later recurrence of cancer."

Yeung and colleagues developed a new method of harvesting samples rich in cancer stem cells from bowel cancer cell lines and maintaining them in simple cell cultures in the lab. They used established cell lines, known as biological markers, to isolate the cancer stem cells, which were then collected and placed in largely standard cell culture conditions.

The researchers said this approach could change the way that research is conducted on stem cell cancer lines and should enable repeatable, large-scale screening of drugs. It would also assist in efforts to characterize cancer stem cells and their roles in tumor growth.

"Working with cell lines is a much more convenient way to study these cells than using samples taken from human patients or using animal models," the study's leader, Sir Walter Bodmer, said in the news release. "We can now evaluate anti-cancer drugs better to see whether they attack cancer stem cells."

The researchers also determined that cancer stem cells aren't necessarily just a small subset of cells within a tumor, as had been widely believed.

"People have assumed that cancer stem cells made up a small proportion of the cells in a tumor, but it is becoming increasingly clear that this is not correct," Yeung said. "The most aggressive tumors can have a majority of cells that are cancer stem cells."

The study was slated for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More information

The U.S. National Cancer Institute has more about cancer stem cells.