I recently had a health journalist interview me about the new guidelines for mammography under 50.

You may recall a storm of controversy was touched off in December 2009, when the US Preventive Services Task Force recommended that mammography begin at 50.  Sarah Palin went so far as to compare these recommendations to "death panels" under health care reform.  The controversy died down, and health care reform legislation was rewritten to ensure access to mammographic screening.

The findings were presented today at the ASCO GI malignancies symposium that disease free survival was improved with oral Xeloda versus conventional intravenous 5FU in patients with early colon cancer. Dr. Daniel Haller from University of Pennsylvania presented the data; he has been working on colon cancer research protocols for many years.

The media perhaps overreacted to the news: headlines such as

(reproduced from Medscape.com original link: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/703926) June 4 2009 (Orlando Florida) — It has been nearly 10 years in coming but at last there is a positive result with a vaccine approach to follicular lymphoma. Two other phase 3 clinical trials have failed but the one that succeeded was reported during a plenary session here at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 45th Annual Meeting.

Sorafenib is an oral multiple kinase inhibitor that targets both tumor-cell proliferation and angiogenesis. Approved in December 2005 for advanced renal cell carcinoma it is being further developed by the manufacturer for metastatic melanoma advanced primary liver cancer and NSCLC. Sorafenib has established potent anti-tumor activity in preclinical xenograft models of different tumor types by virtue of its anti-angiogenic anti-proliferative and proapoptotic effects.

Obesity may limit your chances of becoming a dad even if you're otherwise a healthy person. Research suggests that you may have problems becoming a father if you are more than mildly overweight. The researchers found that among healthy men who were ages 19-48 those who were obese were less likely to have fathered a child than those who were not. Now while the attractiveness to the opposite sex could be factored into that what was more important was that the men were shown to have hormonal changes that lowered their capacity to father children.