Finding ways to protect yourself from cancer

In college, we do not always think about the way our lifestyles can affect our futures. Certain choices made today may have a direct effect on our health and can specifically increase cancer risk. The following are examples of ways to decrease your risk for some types of cancer.Skin cancer from UV rays is the most common of all cancer types. People who are at a greater risk include those with fair skin, moles, those who burn easily, those who have a family history of skin cancer, take oral contraceptives/antidepressants and spend a lot of time outdoors. To protect from skin cancer, find shade and wear hats and sunglasses when outdoors. When using sunscreen, apply SPF of at least 15 every two hours. Also, check yourself monthly for skin changes and report them to your doctor. Tobacco use accounts for about one-third of all cancer deaths in the United States and causes 90 percent of all lung cancer. Smokers are not the only ones being harmed by their habit. Second-hand smoke kills, too. Cancers caused by tobacco use include cancers of the oral cavity, esophagus and even the bladder. The first thing to do is to quit smoking. Call the Pennsylvania Quit line at 1-800-Quit Now. Call the Student Health Center for an appointment to discuss free medication to help with quitting. Pick up a Quit-Kit at the Wellness Center. If one chooses to smoke, avoid smoking around others.Diets high in fruits and vegetables may help reduce the risk for cancer and heart disease. To get the five recommended servings of fruits and vegetables, try these tips for a day.For breakfast, top cereal with fruit, such as a banana, and drink four ounces of 100 percent fruit juice. At lunchtime, add a small side salad with low-fat dressing to any meal for an extra serving of vegetables. Even if a person only has five minutes, dinner veggies are easy and delicious. Heat canned or frozen peas or cauliflower in the microwave for a quick side dish. For a snack idea, freeze half a cup of fresh fruit.

Also, a handful of fresh baby carrots or a cup of applesauce will add another serving to your diet.Drinking alcohol in college can increase the risk for certain cancers later in life such as breast cancer, esophageal cancer, prostate cancer and stomach cancer. To protect yourself, try to limit alcohol consumption to one drink per day.Genital HPV or Human papillomavirus has been linked to cervical cancer, according to tellsomeone.com. To help protect your future keep these things in mind. Have regular pap tests, limit your sexual partners, and use a condom every time. Stay in a long-term exclusive relationship. Lastly, consider the Gardasil injection, which is available at the health center.For more information on ways to decrease your risk for cancer, please visit www. Cancer.org.

Beauty tips for cancer patients

Looking good can be an effective hedge against feeling absolutely rotten. So when cancer treatments take a toll on your skin and hair, that's truly adding insult to injury. But there's help from makeup artist Ramy Gafni, a survivor of non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
Mr. Gafni, who has a cosmetics line at www.ramy.com, teaches classes at New York's CancerCare and has written Ramy Gafni's Beauty Therapy: The Ultimate Guide to Looking and Feeling Great While Living With Cancer (M. Evans and Co. Inc., $25).
Here are some of his tips for looking good throughout your cancer treatment.
Skin care
Your favorite products probably won't be kind enough right now. "It's best to just assume you're sensitive, and treat yourself with kid gloves," Mr. Gafni says. "Use very basic products – no anti-aging or fruit acids, anything exfoliating. In fact, I highly recommend baby products – Johnson's Baby Wash or Baby Lotion."
If you lose your hair, give your scalp tender care. "Treat the top of the head as an extension of your face. It's skin, just like the rest of you, but it's like baby skin that's never been exposed to anything."

For radiation burns, try 100 percent pure aloe vera gel. "You can get it at health-food stores. Keep it refrigerated. It's very refreshing."

Skin tone
"I went through chemo myself. You look white, you look green, you look yellow. It was like multicolor skin. Every day was an adventure."
Men and women look better with a touch of powder or gel bronzer. "It livens up your complexion, and that's true for people of any ethnicity." Choose a medium shade. "Apply it where the sun would naturally hit you on your hairline, cheeks, chin." If the color seems bright, tone it down with translucent powder. "I prefer pressed to loose because with loose powder you get too much powder on your skin."
For dark circles around the eyes, apply a moisturizing concealer around the orb of the eye, from lash line to brow bone.
Even if you don't usually wear cosmetics or you gravitate to quiet colors, go for bold. "Adding a slightly bright blush or lip color can make a huge difference. Your face suddenly comes to life. If you're intimidated by color, try a sheer formula or a gloss."

Eyebrows and eyelashes
False eyelashes aren't a great idea. "When you're going through treatment, your immune system is compromised, and you're more susceptible to infection from the glue." Plus, he points out, you could be pulling out real, regrown eyelashes when you remove the fakes.
Use a neutral color to line the upper lash line. "Pen or pencil adheres to bare skin better than a powder. Don't make a straight line, smudge it. It doesn't have to be perfect. That actually looks like real hair."
While your lashes are vulnerable, avoid waterproof mascara. "It's cumbersome to remove, and you'll be pulling out the good lashes while you're tugging to remove it."
If your eyebrows get sparse, fill in the gaps with a color that's lighter than the remaining hairs.
If you lose your eyebrows altogether, make drawn-on brows look more natural by choosing a color that's as close as possible to your natural brows and then pat on some translucent powder. "That takes the sheen off the color, makes it look not so strong."
As your brows grow back, resist the temptation to clean up stragglers. "Wait until there's a line to work with. Bite the bullet and let it grow in. Don't keep pulling out strays. They might be part of your eyebrows once they come in."

Hair
People usually approach the wig issue one of two ways, Mr. Gafni says. One group gets playful and becomes the blonde, brunette, redhead or baldie Mother Nature never intended. Others are traumatized by the hair loss and want a wig that matches as close to their own hair as possible. "I advise those people to go shopping for a wig while you still have your hair. You don't know wigs, but the wig person knows hair. If it's too late to go while you have hair, bring a swatch and a picture of yourself with hair."

Broccoli Extract Could Help Head Off Skin Cancer

New research suggests that broccoli, the vegetable that the former president famously demonized as inedible, can prevent the damage from ultraviolet light that often leads to skin cancer. And as Bush would surely appreciate, he would not even have to eat it.

In tests on people and hairless mice, a green smear of broccoli-sprout extract blocked the potentially cancer-causing damage usually inflicted by sunlight and showed potential advantages over sunscreens.
The product is still in the early stages of development. Among other issues to be worked out is how best to remove the extract's green pigments, which do not contribute to its protective effects and would give users a temporary Martian complexion.
But scientists said the research represents a significant advance because the extract works not by screening out the sun's rays -- which has the downside of blocking sun-induced Vitamin D production -- but by turning on the body's natural cancer-fighting machinery. Once stimulated, those mechanisms work for days, long after the extract is washed away.
"Ultraviolet radiation is probably the most universal and abundant carcinogen in the world," said Paul Talalay of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, who led the research, published yesterday in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And although the new study stops short of proving that broccoli extracts can prevent human skin cancer, he said, it demonstrates "direct protection" against that carcinogen, which contributes to the 1 million U.S. skin cancer cases seen annually.
"It's very important work," said Michael Sporn, a professor of pharmacology at Dartmouth Medical School, who for nearly two decades headed the National Cancer Institute's program on cancer prevention by means of natural products.
"The use of dietary substances, like the antioxidant vitamins C and E, has been pretty much a colossal failure for protection against almost any kind of human disease," Sporn said, "because when you eat them they don't go where you want them to . . . and as soon as your body uses them up, they're gone."
By contrast, he said, boosting production of the body's own cancer-fighting mechanisms "is a new and promising approach."
Broccoli's rise from farm to pharma began in 1992 when Talalay and colleagues reported that broccoli -- and especially three-day-old broccoli sprouts, they found later -- is rich in sulforaphane, a compound that activates certain enzymes in the body.
Those "Phase 2" enzymes, such as glutathione S-transferase, can neutralize the DNA-damaging molecules that are created in the skin by the mix of oxygen and sunlight. They can also temper the inflammatory reactions that can turn precancerous cells into life-threatening tumors.
Talalay's discovery got his family and Johns Hopkins into the broccoli-sprout business. His son is chief executive of Brassica Protection Products LLC, which licensed the technology from Johns Hopkins and produces "BroccoSprouts" brand broccoli sprouts, a popular health food. But more recently Talalay has focused on sulforaphane as a topical protective against skin cancer.
His team exposed areas of volunteers' skin to intense ultraviolet light one to three days after the broccoli-sprout extract was applied to some areas. The extract was all but rubbed and washed away by the time the light exposure occurred, but by then the sulforaphane had turned on key genes in the skin cells, which beefed up production of Phase 2 enzymes.
Compared with untreated areas, spots treated with the extract had, on average, 37 percent less redness and inflammation -- key measures of future skin cancer risk. Other tests have shown that mice treated with the extract get significantly fewer and smaller skin tumors after exposure to ultraviolet light.
Allan Conney, director of the laboratory for cancer research at Rutgers University's School of Pharmacy, warned that the work only hints at an ability to prevent cancers in people and that in the study, the extract's ability to reduce ultraviolet-induced damage varied considerably from person to person, from a low of about 8 percent protection to a high of 78 percent. Still, he said, the broccoli approach "could have truly broad significance."
Albena Dinkova-Kostova, co-leader of the new study with Talalay and now at the University of Dundee in Scotland, said several hurdles stand between the experiments and a broccoli-based anti-cancer skin cream.
Among them are the need to find the most effective concentration of sulforaphane, increase the active ingredient's shelf life, and improve skin absorption of sulforaphane. That last task was accomplished in the tests by mixing it with acetone, an ingredient in nail polish remover that, while safe in small quantities, is not something people would want to slather on their skin.
Then there is the extract's green tint, which would be absent if the team were to synthesize the sulforaphane instead of getting it from sprouts. But that would raise safety and regulatory concerns.
"The advantage of starting with sprouts is that we all eat broccoli so we're not concerned with toxicity issues," Dinkova-Kostova said, adding that she anticipated no problems getting the green out.