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Books > Medicine > Clinical & internal medicine > Diseases & disorders > Oncology
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Three Daughters, Three Journeys - Quest for Cancer Cure (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,039
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Three Daughters, Three Journeys - Quest for Cancer Cure (Hardcover)
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Cancer threatens the lives of people around the world. Women, in
particular, are at risk of certain cancers with a genetic cause.
Certain mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes put mothers and
daughters at risk of breast and ovarian cancers. Unlike many
cancers that most commonly occur after age 60, these inheritable
cancers threaten women's lives, health and fertility even when they
are young, before most would even begin to go for annual mammogram
screenings to check for breast cancer. Three Daughters, Three
Journeys takes on the biggest health issue of our time from a
global perspective with three heroines fighting for their lives
against cancer. Marzena, a Polish oncology nurse, has spent her
life treating child patients with cancer. Then, she confronts it in
her own family and her own body. Kamola, a rural Indian girl, knows
she has symptoms of the same disease that took her mother, but
feels afraid to discuss it with her father and brothers, knowing
her family cannot afford medical treatment. Kamola confides in Dr
Rini Mishra, a doctor testing a new treatment called Neelazin,
using a bacterial anticancer protein in food, to destroy cancer
cells. Selena, a wealthy woman of color in Chicago, finds out about
her genetic risks of breast and ovarian cancer. She has a choice of
preventative surgery that will save her life but remove any chance
of having children. As she meets women who struggle to afford
cancer treatment, Selena dedicates her life to providing affordable
homes and counseling to families affected by the disease. Although
the drug Neelazin is fictional, the possibility of new cancer
treatments using bacterial anticancer proteins is being researched
now. A problem with the current chemotherapy for cancer treatment
is the high toxicity of most of these drugs, as these drugs can
enter both normal and cancer cells, though preferably cancer cells,
causing the death of normal cells as well that are important in
maintaining health. Another problem is that current
chemotherapeutic drugs mostly target a single or few key steps that
are important for cancer growth and proliferation and inhibit the
growth of cancer cells. The cancer cells respond by quickly
changing these single targets, thereby becoming resistant to the
drugs, as is reflected in stage IV cancer patients. An alternative
to chemotherapy would be to exploit the bacterial evolutionary
wisdom and use certain proteins that can have preferential entry to
cancer cells in order to minimize normal cell toxicity and multiple
targets in cancer cells through protein-protein complex formation,
thus reducing resistance development in cancer cells. An
interesting advantage of protein drugs is to express them as part
of food, and some recent research seems to suggest that oral
consumption of such foods may allow the therapeutic protein to
reach the blood stream to target the cancer. Women with the genetic
risk factors could soon have the choice of taking a pill or such
anticancer protein-expressing food to treat or prevent cancer,
rather than removing the healthy tissue of the breasts and ovaries.
Hopefully, they would not have to choose between fertility and
survival, as is the implied message in this book, fictional as it
is at this time.
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