As soon as I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I started reading, researching, and investigating. I hunted down every bit of information I could find about the disease that had somehow tunneled through my breast tissue. What I found kept me in the know. I felt informed and in control -- and a bit skittish too.

My doctor once told me to stop reading. It was causing me too much worry, too much unnecessary stress. And while I didn't stop reading altogether, I did cut down on my Internet research. Since anyone can post anything on the Internet, it can be an iffy source of information. So iffy that some doctors -- like mine -- have expressed concern.

Doctors may be able to breathe a sigh of relief, though. According to a study published in the April issue of the International Journal of Medical Informatics, using the internet generally convinces patients that their doctors are right on track with their medical opinions.

Source: MAMM magazine, May/June 2007

Vitamin D is one of the latest, greatest hot cancer topics. Why? Well, it seems many of us women are vitamin D deficient. Such a deficiency might be linked to breast cancer risk so it's in our best interest to make sure we get a healthy dose of this vitamin. It's not as easy as adhering to the Dietary Reference Intake (DRI) guidelines, though. Follow them and you'll still come up short -- the Food and Nutrition Board, responsible for setting the DRIs, have not yet updated guidelines in light of cancer concerns. So what's a girl to do?

For starters, we need to understand that for overall health benefits, 1,000 IU (International Units) per day are necessary. The outdated DRI recommends 200 to 600 IU. This is based on preventing only bone diseases like rickets. Second, keep in mind it's safe to take up to 10,000 IU each day. Third, up your intake of this important vitamin. Here's how:

Fatty fish is the best source of vitamin D. But watch out for high mercury levels. Fortified milk is also good. It has 100 IU of vitamin D per eight-ounce serving, but cow's milk been linked to breast cancer risk as well.

Bill France Jr., the man who helped build Daytona International Speedway and built NASCAR into a nationwide billion-dollar conglomerate, died Monday at his Daytona Beach, Fla. home. France had been diagnosed with cancer in 1999 -- he never publicly disclosed any details about his disease -- and had been in poor health for much of the past 10 years. He was 74.

"He had a remarkable career and an even more remarkable life," said his son, Brian France, who replaced him as chairman in 2003. "Words cannot express how much he'll be missed by myself and the rest of our family and by the NASCAR industry overall."

France spent 31 years as NASCAR chairman and earned himself a reputation as a benevolent dictator. He rarely compromised yet always did what was best for NASCAR. France's passing is a huge loss for the sport.

Cancer cases are expected to more than double between the years 2000 and 2030, says the director of the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer.

This upward climb will occur primarily in poor countries due to an increase in population growth, longer life expectancy, more smoking, and a lack of health care in low and medium-resource countries.

"What's going to happen between now and 2030 is that the population is going to increase from about 6.5 billion to 8 billion in 2030," Dr. Peter Boyle reports. "So even if the risks remain constant at each five-year age group, because we've got more people around, we're going to have more cases of cancer.

It's the unfortunate successes for developed countries over the past 40 years, such as the export of cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption, that have doomed poorer countries, says Boyle.

Consider this definition of doom: By the year 2030, there will be 27 million cases of cancer, 17 million deaths caused by the disease, and 75 million people living with cancer.

When I told my husband that the use of cannabis is being linked to a five percent increase in lung cancer risk -- that's 15 new cases each year in New Zealand where a study was just conducted -- he seemed to think this risk is comparable to his dying from a grasshopper landing in his eye.

A scientist John is not, but his thoughts on the matter seem to parallel international thinking on the drug which goes something like this: the risk marijuana use has on cancer incidence is so very low it's hardly worthy of much worry.

A California study of more than 1600 people last year found no link between cancer and smoking the drug, despite researchers' prediction they would find some kind of connection.

New Zealand researchers have found a connection, though, and however small it may seem, they say it's significant.

They found the risk of developing lung cancer increased by about eight percent each year for people whose cumulative exposure equated to smoking one joint per day -- about the same as the increase for someone who smokes one pack of cigarettes per day. They also found the younger someone starting smoking cannabis, the greater the risk and that contributing risk factors include smokers' deeper inhalation and the tendency to hold smoke in their lungs.

Cannabis, the most commonly used recreational drug in the world with 161 million users, has been thought to have a protective effect against cancer due to its chemical THC, which appears to kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous. This study may prove otherwise.

Lance Mackey beat cancer back in 2001 and on Tuesday he won the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Nome, Alaska. Mackey was diagnosed with neck cancer in 2001 and received surgery and radiation for his treatment.

Lance owns a kennel named Lance Mackey's Comeback Kennel. He indeed made a comeback, he has back to back wins in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race.

Mackey's status as a cancer survivor and champion musher will inspire other people with cancer, said Christine Schultz, 42, of Nome, a medical social worker who stood out in subzero temperatures with co-workers from Norton Sound Regional Hospital to watch Mackey cross the finish line. "I think it gives people hope they can overcome cancer and live their dreams," she said.

Don't ever doubt I can't do something," Mackey said in Nome after his win. "I lived through cancer."

Some scientists believe that surgery to remove a breast tumor may actually help the cancer spread and have recently reported that this same belief may be the exact reason black women are more likely to die of breast cancer.

There is apparently a widespread belief in parts of Africa and the United States that removing a tumor hastens death.

"I must say that I am sure there is more to this than just a myth," said Michael Retsky of Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, who shares his opinions in the International Journal of Surgery.

Retsky still urges any woman with breast cancer to have her tumor removed. And he says chemotherapy is such standard practice for any cancer threatening to spread. It's a safety net of sorts to catch the cells that get away. So if surgery causes cancer to spread, then in theory, chemotherapy should stop the spread.

Retsky, who is not suggesting any change in clinical practice, thinks the subject needs far more research. American Cancer Society experts, who tend to question this theory, agree.

"Whether or not the theory is correct, I have difficulty with the logic that they employed to get there," said oncologist Dr. Len Lichtenfeld of the American Cancer Society who says women should never delay treatment for breast cancer.

Retsky believes that perhaps surgery, by wounding the body, causes it to produce growth factors that fuel the growth of other, tiny tumors. Or maybe a primary tumor secretes some sort of factor that holds the other tumors in check. When the main tumor is removed, the smaller tumors grow.

But it could be that surgery does not cause a spread at all – and that any belief of this nature has no connection with breast cancer tendencies in black women. It may be that black women just have a genetic predisposition for more aggressive forms of the disease.

Findings from an international study suggest that women with a waist size of more than 34 inches are more likely to develop cancer of the womb than women who boast slimmer waistlines.

The study, funded in part by the British charity Cancer Research UK, sized up 223,000 women worldwide and determined that women with a waistline less than 31 inches have half the risk of developing womb cancer than their heavier counterparts.

There has been a significant rise in cases of womb cancer in Britain. And the link between the disease and weight gain is most prevalent among postmenopausal women who have never used hormone replacement therapy or the birth control pill.

According to the National Sizing Survey conducted in 2004, the average British woman now has a 34-inch waist. This is more than six inches bigger than the average size of a woman in the 1950s, says Dr. Lesley Walker of Cancer Research UK.

"Women are larger than they were when they existed on a wartime diet and were generally more active and this is having serious consequences," Walker says.

More than 6,000 women in the UK are diagnosed with womb cancer each year. The disease kills about 1,000 annually.

Breast cancer drug tamoxifen, designed to cut recurrence in women with estrogen-receptor positive disease, has been shown to continue working long after women stop taking the drug. And two studies suggest it might also offer long-term protection for healthy women with high risk of developing breast cancer.

One such study found the drug decreases risk of hormone-sensitive breast cancer by 39 percent over 20 years. Another shows a 34 percent decrease for up to eight years after the therapy concludes.

Published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, one study -- the International Breast Cancer Intervention Study, or IBIS -- looked at 7,145 women at high risk of breast cancer. And for the first time, clear evidence has surfaced in support of the merits of tamoxifen after the completion of treatment.

IBIS study participants took either a daily dose of tamoxifen or a placebo for five years. At the eight-year mark, 87 women who took the actual drug were diagnosed with estrogen-receptor positive breast cancer. And 129 women in the placebo group were diagnosed with the same disease.

In the second study, researchers from the Royal Marsden Hospital in London investigated 20-year data on 2,471 healthy women at high risk of breast cancer who took tamoxifen for six or seven years. Similar results were found.

Despite the benefits of tamoxifen as a preventative treatment, the drug is not currently approved for this use in the UK, where breast cancer is the most common form of female cancer.

International pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca is donating $10 million to the American Cancer Society (ACS). The donation is one of the largest gifts ever received by the ACS and will help provide support for patients in United States hospitals.

Support will come in the form of specially-trained ACS employees who will work in 60 different hospitals and cancer centers and will offer social, emotional, financial, and transportation assistance in medically underserved Atlanta areas.

London-based AstraZeneca, maker of breast cancer drug tamoxifen and other breast and prostate cancer drugs, made $26 billion in sales last year, the same year the company gave $7 million to a Boston Cancer Society for the development of a Hope Lodge.

Katherine Schaefer was investigating methods for treating the inflammation seen in Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis when something terrible happened -- she noticed her carefully cultured cells were dead. And then something wonderful happened -- she realized she had stumbled upon a potential new method of attacking cancerous tumors that have become resistant to existing drugs.

Schaefer and her colleagues at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York were testing a compound called a PPAR-gamma modulator -- a compound never considered a cancer drug, or a drug of any kind really -- when Schaefer made a calculation error and used a lot more of the compound than she should have. And her cells died.

Upon further study, Schaefer found the compound killed just about every possible epithelial tumor cell. These cells line organs such as the colon and also the skin. The compound, that works like taxane drugs but without eventual tumor resistance, also killed colon tumors in mice without making them sick.

The research team, whose findings are published in the journal International Cancer Research, plans more safety tests in mice. And eventually, if their outcomes are promising, they plan to design something they can patent as a new drug -- because they would love to see this disastrous lab experiment one day lead to treatment for cancers of the colon, esophagus, liver, and skin.

I guess the concept is happy -- the public urging for our world's policy makers to make cancer a top priority -- but the fact that becomes all too apparent on this World Cancer Day is quite sobering. More than seven million people die from cancer and close to 11 million new cases are diagnosed worldwide each year. In 2006, cancer killed more people than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined.

So today is both happy and sad. But for now, let's focus on the happy.

The Geneva-based International Union Against Cancer (UICC) and member organizations in 86 countries are launching a five-year campaign to impart life lessons to children so they can prevent cancer later in life. Parents are critical in this campaign and must take an active role in teaching their children techniques for saving their lives.

Forty-three percent of cancer cases can be prevented through healthy lifestyles that begin in childhood. The World Cancer Campaign slogan -- Today's Children, Tomorrow's World -- underscores the possibility that a concerted effort among world leaders, parents, and their children can make a real difference through four key actions -- providing a smoke-free environment for children; ensuring children keep physically active, eat a healthy diet, and avoid obesity; educating children about vaccines for virus-related liver and cervical cancers; and limiting children's exposure to the sun.

Former First Lady Barbara Bush, Her Royal Highness Lalla Slama of Morocco, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, and tennis star Steffi Graf are some of the powerful voices powering this campaign that UICC president Dr. Franco Cavalli says can save so many lives if embraced by those at the highest decision-making levels.

"Complacency and inaction on the part of world community will effectively contribute to more than 10 million deaths every year by 2020," he said.

On December 8, 2006, I wrote about a Danish study investigating the possible link between cell phone use and cancer. This largest-ever study of it's kind put fears to rest. Cell phones do not cause cancer, said researchers who announced that cell phone users -- even long-term users -- are at no more risk of developing cancer than their non-cell phone using counterparts.

There's just no biological basis for concern about radio waves, reported the lead investigator of this study. But another newer study reports something entirely different.

Long-term mobile phone users are more likely to develop cancer -- brain cancer, on the side of the head where the phone is held -- according to the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority in Finland. It will all be detailed later this year in the International Journal of Cancer, but the general gist of the study is already circulating.

The study -- the second one to suggest an increased risk of cancer due to emissions from cell phones -- found that people who regularly used cell phones for more than 10 years were 40 percent more likely to develop nervous system tumors called gliomas. Comparisons were made between 1,521 people with gliomas and 3,301 people without the tumors. While no connections were initially made between the phones and cancer, a link was found when researchers specifically focused on those who had used their phones for more than 10 years.

Short-term use of cell phones has never been linked to cancer. That's good. But I tend to believe cell phones are going to become even more a staple of our technologically-driven lives than they are now. And so 10 years may actually be considered short-term one day -- which means we all may soon be at risk.

For now, until research becomes more conclusive, we get to pick and choose which study to stand behind. So take your pick -- and stay tuned for future scientific revelations.

You're in luck if you like fruit, vegetables, and milk -- because Italian researchers say these items appear to reduce the likelihood of developing liver cancer.

Diet plays a significant role in the risk of liver cancer, says the lead researcher of this study who singles out fruits and vegetables as the foods with the most protective effect.

Subjects of this study -- published in the International Journal of Cancer -- were 185 patients with liver cancer and a comparison group of 412 controls without cancer. Participants responded to questions about diet, and their answers showed that as intake of certain foods went up, the risk of liver cancer went down. Factoring out other issues possibly contributing to this indication, researchers found that high intake of milk and yogurt cut the risk of developing liver cancer by 78 percent. High consumption of white meat lowered the risk by 56 percent, and when combined with high intake of fruit, this number dropped to 52 percent.

These finding are particularly important for patients with hepatitis B and hepatitis C (HCV) infection. But overall, experts say anyone wishing to ward off liver cancer should adopt a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, limit alcohol consumption, and avoid HCV infection by practicing safe sex and never sharing needles.

Carrying extra weight is a risk factor for developing breast cancer. But it's not been clear how the timing of weight gain affects this risk. Evidence is mounting, though, and it's now believed that weight gain in adult life is more predictive of breast cancer risk than absolute body weight.

A new study, published in December's International Journal of Cancer, reveals a link between gaining weight in adulthood and an increased risk of breast cancer after menopause.

"We did find some suggestion that weight gain during the 30s and 40s, weight gain since a woman's first pregnancy and weight gain since menopause, especially for women with a longer time since menopause, may all be of importance in relation to postmenopausal breast cancer risk," report the researchers who followed 1,166 women with breast cancer and 2,105 without the disease.

A 70 percent increased risk was found among postmenopausal women who gained more than 60 pounds between age 20 and the onset of menopause. This was in comparison to women who gained less than 20 pounds during the same period of time. Overall, there was a four percent increase in breast cancer risk for each 11-pound increase in adult weight.