Cancer | featured news

It seems like almost every day, we hear about another miraculous advance in cancer treatment. Drugs that cause tumors to shrink, gene therapies, and even a possible vaccine.

Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, the winningest coach in major college football history who was fired in November over a child sexual abuse scandal involving an assistant that rocked America, died on Sunday of lung cancer.

Former Penn State coach Joe Paterno, being treated for lung cancer, is in serious condition, a family spokesman said Saturday.

Cancer-related deaths in the United States are dropping — and have been for the past two decades — according to this year's annual report by the American Cancer Society. And some of the largest reductions came in cases involving the biggest killers, including breast, colon, lung, and prostate cancers. The decline came thanks mostly to early detection by increasingly sophisticated screening methods, and advances in treatment.

Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner never had thyroid cancer despite being diagnosed with the disease last month, her spokesman said on Saturday.

Jenni Lake gave birth to a baby boy the month before her 18th birthday, though she was not destined to become just another teenage mother. That much, she knew. While being admitted to the hospital, she pulled her nurse down to her at bed level and whispered into her ear. The nurse would later repeat the girl's words to comfort her family, as their worst fears were realized a day after Jenni's baby was born.

French health authorities are considering whether to suggest that an estimated 30,000 women in France get their breast implants removed, amid warnings by leading doctors about the risks of rupture and possible cancer....

Tanning beds have already been linked to an increased risk of the deadliest type of skin cancer and now new research shows they can also raise the odds of developing the most common form of the disease.

If you want the FDA to approve more innovative, new drugs based on promising but early clinical results, you have to give the FDA a way to revoke those approvals later on, should larger trials prove that those drugs aren't as safe or effective as they first seemed. This is why the FDA should be congratulated for the way it has handled the Avastin breast cancer saga, and why I hope we will see the FDA handle more cases like this one, not less.

Penn State's former coach has a treatable form of lung cancer, his son says. Paterno was fired last week after a former assistant was charged with abusing children.