Cancer | featured news

The governor, 74, is receiving radiotherapy for early stage cancer. His chances for recovery are excellent, experts say. SACRAMENTO — Gov.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has flown to Cuba for a third cancer operation after designating the vice president as his political heir. State television showed images of Mr Chavez hugging vice president Nicolas Maduro and other aides before boarding the presidential jet.

Allyn Rose’s father first suggested the mastectomy when she was a freshman in college. It was a couple years after her mother had succumbed to breast cancer; genetic testing and a long, sad family history of early deaths indicated that Rose, too, was at a high risk.

With thinning brown hair and nearly invisible eyebrows, Margaret Fisher sits her frail frame down in the salon chair. She received a diagnosis of Stage IV pancreatic cancer almost two years ago and has undergone 18 radiation treatments and six rounds of chemotherapy since. A hairstylist places a wig on Fisher’s head and draws eyebrows on her bare face. Fisher, 63, looks in the mirror and smiles.

Lance Armstrong has cut formal ties with his cancer-fighting charity to avoid further damage brought by doping charges and being stripped of his seven Tour de France titles.

Rather strange news was bouncing around Reddit recently, and it all started with a man relieving himself on a pregnancy test stick. In case you don’t know how a pregnancy stick works, here’s a quick tutorial: remove stick from box, pee on stick, watch to see if a pink line, blue line, plus or minus symbol, or whatever symbol the instructions tell you to look for appears. If the symbol appears, you are probably pregnant — that is, if you’re a woman.

Sharon Osbourne says she had a double mastectomy after learning she carries a gene that increases the risk of developing breast cancer. "The Talk" co-host told Hello! magazine that "I didn't want to live the rest of my life with that shadow hanging over me." The 60-year-old "America's Got Talent" judge, who had colon cancer a decade ago, said that without the surgery, "the odds are not in my favor."

A study on mice suggests that pheomelanin pigment, which gives rise to red hair, is itself a potential trigger for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. Doctors have long urged people with red hair, fair skin and freckles to avoid the sun and its damaging ultraviolet rays.

Breast cancer screening for women over 50 saves lives, an independent panel in Britain has concluded, confirming findings in U.S. and other studies. But, the review found that for every life saved, roughly three other women were overdiagnosed.

The most common and aggressive brain tumor grows by turning normal brain cells into stem cells, which can continuously replicate and regrow a tumor with only a handful of cells left behind, new research finds.