Empowering Health in Women

March 8, International Women’s Day, a time to reflect on progress and changes made by ordinary women and celebrate their courage and determination to fight against all the odds of the society and becoming an extraordinary role model.

This determination and courage can also be clearly seen in Women in the Medical field. With the history of domination by men in the field of medicine, especially physicians and surgeons, current stats show the growing percentage of women in this field. Women make up almost half of the current medical fields, despite all the difficulties such as Gender discrimination and blatant sexism.

While celebrating the empowerment and emergence of Women in every field, let us also create awareness of cancer in women. While taking care and nurturing their family and growing in their professionalism, women, often seems to avoid their health and overlook the symptoms. Hence, it is necessary to create cancer awareness among women.

Breast Cancer, Cervical Cancer, Lung Cancer, and Ovarian Cancer are the most common type of cancer in women. Knowing and understanding their symptoms can greatly help for the early detection or even to prevent them.

Breast Cancer: It is the most common type of cancer and can occur at any stage. It is advised to see a doctor directly if you feel or notice any changes like lump or pain.

Cervical Cancer- Every woman who is sexually active, is at risk of developing this cancer as it occurs due to human papillomavirus passed during sex. Regular Pap tests can find changes in the cervix that can be treated before they become cancer.

Lung Cancer- It accounts for almost 25% of the death of female cancer deaths. Smoking increases the death percentage by 30-40%, but passive smokers are also at high risk to develop this cancer. Though breast cancer is more common, lung cancer is more likely responsible for more deaths as people avoid the symptoms if they don’t smoke.

Ovarian cancer- it is more like to occur in older women. Women with infertility, who never had children, have children after 30, increases the risk of occurrence. There are no exact tests to find ovarian cancer, but if you feel symptoms like abdominal swelling and pain, digestive problems and feeling of urinate all the times, it is advised to see a doctor.

With the 2019 theme “Think equal, build smart, and innovate for change”, let’s celebrate women's achievement, raise awareness against bias and take action for equality and also lead a healthier and longer life to protect our loved ones.

I think you have Cancer: Look what your Dog knows

The great ability of animals to sense danger such as the natural disaster like earthquakes, tsunamis etc., are already well known. But most interestingly it was found that the dogs can sense and detect cancer and other diseases. In recent years, this observation has become an area of interest and attracted widespread coverage. Many researches have been done to reason this outstanding ability of the dogs.

The dazzling smelling ability of Dogs is no secret. They can smell even the slightest odor such as a drop of blood in a swimming pool. This remarkable sense of smell is already in use for dogs to sniff narcotics and explosives in the military. But the studies have suggested that this olfactory ability of dogs is also useful to sniff out cancer and other diseases in humans and has been named as Canine cancer detection.

As humans can smell cancer in the later stages of cancer, it makes sense that dogs are able to detect cancer way before at zero stage and are well qualified for this accomplishment. Dogs have 300 million smell receptors compared to humans with only 6 million of them. This boosts their smelling ability to 100,000 times. Also, the greater part of a dog’s brain is devoted to smell or the olfactory cortex, which is dominated by visual cortex in human, making the dogs to analyze smells 40 times better than us.

But the question arises that what is there in cancer that dog smells?

This is supported by the fact that cancerous cells release very low concentrations of the alkanes and aromatic compounds that is different from the metabolic products generated by healthy cells. This significant change can be smelled by the dogs in urine, sweat, feces, and breath. This has been confirmed in case of skin cancers where dogs detect cancer by just simply sniffing the skin lesions.

This potential advantage of dog has significant benefits for human in the medical field. Using a dog to detect cancer even at the earliest stage or at the stage enough to be treatable, can greatly help to cure a patient.  Canine care detection is a low-risk and non-invasive method and offers various other advantages. Some researchers believe the trained dogs will become integrated directly into patient care, while other researchers recommend using this skill for developing machines that can reliably detect odor signatures from cancer, such as electronic noses.

In almost all the cases where the owners get themselves diagnosed as per the alert from their dogs, it is detected early enough to be treatable with a positive outcome.

So, if your dogs started acting weirdly around you or your family, listen to them and visit a Doctor!!!

The Secret Connection of CANCER to HEART HEALTH

Heart diseases have always been the leading cause of death all across the world, followed by the deaths from Cancer. Now the studies have revealed that the Cancer treatment also leads to cardiac side effects.  It is often observed in the population of people, who are already fighting Cancer, will also develop heart diseases. In fact, for many cases of breast cancer, women are more likely to die of cardiac disease than of cancer itself. This is because, the cancer treatments such as chemotherapy, targeted therapies and radiation therapy, can damage the heart health and leads to various side effects including abnormal heart rhythms, high blood pressure, and heart failure.

Although Cancer therapies affect the number of organs and lead to health conditions such as lung disease and infection or kidney disease, the increase in the cases of cardiac side effects in cancer patients leads to the emergence of a new field, Cardio-Oncology. It involves the study of the adverse effect on the cardiovascular system that occurs as a result of cancer treatment and not so much for the tumor in the heart. The main aim is to minimize the adverse cardiovascular effects in cancer patients.     

These cardiac side-effects can be seen during the treatment or can even be undetected for years or decades after the treatment has ended, known as longer-term cardiovascular side effects or cardiotoxicities.

Cardio-oncology is the team-based approach that involves oncologists, cardiologists, clinical researchers and hematologists to work together for prevention, detection, and management of heart diseases in all the stages of cancer therapy and also in the cancer survivors. This is one of the most promising areas of research and advancements as it can lead to longer survivorship in cancer patients.