Researchers at Boston Medical Center (BMC) have shown that patient navigation services help decrease the time to diagnosis for female patients who have received an abnormal result from a breast or cervical cancer screening. The study demonstrates the importance of patient navigation in helping vulnerable populations get the care that they need in a timely manner and supports the recent standard recommendations for all cancer care centres to provide patient navigation services.
Tracy Battaglia, MD, MPH, director of the Women’s Health Unit at BMC and associate professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), is the study’s lead author.
The Boston Patient Navigation Research Program, which was conducted at six federally qualified inner-city community health centres affiliated with BMC between 2004 and 2008, is part of a five-year national study designed to reduce delays in completing recommended care after an abnormal cancer screening. During the intervention, 1,497 female subjects received patient navigation services and 1,544 were in the control group. All subjects were followed for one year to document whether all recommended tests were completed and women received a final diagnosis of cancer or no cancer.
The subjects who received navigation services were diagnosed in significantly less time and were more likely to ever complete their care compared to the control subjects. The decrease in time was shown among all women who received abnormal cervical screening results and among the subset of women with abnormal breast cancer screening results who took longer than 60 days to complete their care.
Data shows that low-income racial/ethnic minority patients often do not access timely, quality cancer treatment and services. ‘The goal of patient navigation is to facilitate timely care for these vulnerable patients by addressing barriers to care,’ said Battaglia. Patient navigation services include identifying patients at risk for delays in treatment and facilitating appointment scheduling by identifying and addressing barriers that may interfere with this care, such as: child care and transportation services; co-ordinating care among numerous providers; organising interpreter services; and providing guidance and support so patients can advocate for themselves.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in the United States aside from non-melanoma skin cancer and is one of the leading causes of cancer death among women of all races and Hispanic origin populations. The CDC also notes that more black and Hispanic women get HPV-associated cervical cancer than women of other races or ethnicities, which is possibly due to a decreased access to Pap testing or follow-up treatment.
‘This study confirms the long presumed benefit of navigation for vulnerable populations and supports recent standard recommendations for all cancer centres to provide patient navigation services to their patients, especially those whose patients are at risk for delays in care,’ said Battaglia. EurekAlert

Advances in diagnostic imaging have benefited children with otolaryngologic disease, allowing shorter hospital stays, fewer invasive procedures, more targeted surgical procedures, and earlier and more precise diagnoses. However, despite improved technology, concerns about exposure of children to ionising radiation have recently come to the forefront, according to a commentary in the July 2012 issue of Otolaryngology

Researchers have developed a new way to observe and track large numbers of rapidly moving objects under a microscope, capturing precise motion paths in three dimensions.
Over the course of the study researchers followed an unprecedented 24,000 rapidly moving cells over wide fields of view and through large sample volumes, recording each cell’s path for as long as 20 seconds.
‘We can very precisely track the motion of small things, more than a thousand of them at the same time, in parallel,’ says research lead and National Science Foundation CAREER awardee Aydogan Ozcan, an electrical engineering and bioengineering professor at UCLA. ‘We were able to achieve sub-micron accuracy over a large volume, allowing us to understand, statistically, how thousands of objects move in different ways.’
The latest study is an extension of several years of NSF-supported work by Ozcan and his colleagues to develop lens-free, holographic microscopy techniques with applications for field-based detection of blood-borne diseases and other areas of tele-medicine. Those efforts recently resulted in a Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award, among others. Ozcan’s research is also supported through an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award and an Army Research Office Young Investigator Award from the Department of Defense.
For the recent work, Ozcan and his colleagues–Ting-Wei Su, also of UCLA, and Liang Xue, of both UCLA and Nanjing University of Science and Technology in China–used offset beams of red and blue light to create holographic information that, when processed using sophisticated software, accurately reveal the paths of objects moving under a microscope. The researchers tracked several cohorts of more than 1,500 human male gamete cells over a relatively wide field of view (more than 17 square millimeters) and large sample volume (up to 17 cubic millimeters) over several seconds.
The technique, along with a novel software algorithm that the team developed to process observational data, revealed previously unknown statistical pathways for the cells. The researchers found that human male gamete cells travel in a series of twists and turns along a constantly changing path that occasionally follows a tight helix–a spiral that, 90 percent of the time, is in a clockwise (right-handed) direction.
Because only four to five percent of the cells in a given sample travelled in a helical path at any given time, researchers would not have been able to observe the rare behaviour without the new high-throughput microscopy technique.
‘This latest study is an extension of truly novel and creative work,’ says Leon Esterowitz, the NSF biophotonics program officer who has supported Ozcan’s efforts. ‘The holographic technique could accelerate drug discovery and prove valuable for monitoring pharmaceutical treatments of dangerous microbial diseases.’
The paper reports observations of 24,000 cells over the duration of the experiments. Such a large number of observations provide a statistically significant dataset and a useful methodology for potentially studying a range of subjects, from the impact of pharmaceuticals and other substances on large numbers of cells–in real time–to fertility treatments and drug development.
The same approach may also enable scientists to study quick-moving, single-celled micro-organisms. Many of the dangerous protozoa found in unsanitary drinking water and rural bodies of water have only been observed in small samples moving through an area that is roughly two dimensional. The new lens-free holographic imaging technique could potentially reveal unknown elements of protozoan behaviour and allow real-time testing of novel drug treatments to combat some of the most deadly forms of those microbes. National Science Foundation

An injection of banked sperm-producing stem cells can restore fertility to male primates who become sterile due to cancer drug side effects, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Magee-Womens Research Institute. In their animal study previously frozen stem cells restored production of sperm that successfully fertilised eggs to produce early embryos.
Some cancer drugs work by destroying rapidly dividing cells. As it is not possible to discriminate between cancer cells and other rapidly dividing cells in the body, the precursor cells involved in making sperm can be inadvertently wiped out leaving the patient infertile, said senior investigator Kyle Orwig, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Medicine, Pitt School of Medicine, and an investigator at Magee-Womens Research Institute.
‘Men can bank sperm before they have cancer treatment if they hope to have biological children later in their lives,’ he said. ‘But that is not an option for young boys who haven

A new study has determined how often people should get screened for gastric or stomach cancer in high-risk regions of the world. The findings could help reduce deaths from gastric cancer, which is the second most common cause of cancer-related mortality.

Although the incidence of gastric cancer has decreased substantially in the western part of the world, the disease is still common in areas such as Eastern Asia, including Korea, Japan, and China.

Gastric cancer patients’ prognosis strongly depends on the stage of the disease, or how advanced it is, at the time of diagnosis. In other words, early detection and treatment can save lives.

Gastric cancer screening is often done by upper endoscopy