- NYU’s Clinical Correlations blog has a very comprehensive post about educating patients about sun exposure to prevent skin cancer, and references about the science behind sunscreen use. The American Academy of Dermatology recommends an SPF of 30 or higher.
- While vitamin D plays an important role in bone health, a New England Journal of Medicine editorial claims that research done on whether vitamin D prevents cancer has been inconsistent and inconclusive so far.
- A recent KevinMD.com blog post highlights research published in Nature Medicine in July 2010 by Dr. Vincent Tuohy of the Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Vincent Tuohy brings an immunologist’s perspective to cancer research, proposing an autoimmune-mediated strategy for prophylactic breast cancer vaccination.
- Dr. Bruce Chabner of Mass. Gen. Hospital also wrote an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine proposing early accelerated approval by the FDA for highly targeted cancer drugs.
Category Archives: In the News
Blog Buzz: March 21 – March 25
Blog posts of interest from the medical librarianship, oncology and science blogosphere:
- Faculty of 1000’s Naturally Selected blog posted an item about the upcoming issue of Science dedicated to cancer, including malignant melanoma.
- MassGenomics posted an in-depth write-up about new MSKCC research published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The article describes the full genome sequencing of a mouse acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) genome. article
- Dr. Len’s Cancer Blog discussed the controversial role of Vitamin D in cancer prevention.
- Pallimed posted about providing probability and prediction information to patients, starting with the frustration expressed by Dr. Peter Bach’s New York Times blog post about his difficulty getting such information from his wife’s oncologist.
- New guidelines for reporting genetic risk prediction studies were published as a Correspondence in BMC’s Genome Medicine, as well as 9 other journals, last week.
- News from the data archiving front: Genome Biology published an editorial that canvassed five researchers for their opinions on the closing of NCBI’s Sequencing Read Archive (SRA) database due to lack of funds.
- NLM is giving the MyNCBI page in PubMed a redesign, promising a more streamlined and intuitive interface. Get a sneak preview here.
Blog Buzz: March 12 – March 21
News of interest from the medical librarianship, informatics and oncology blogosphere:
- Science blogger Kevin at We, Beasties urged scientists and researchers to contact their Congressional representatives to support continued funding of science by the U.S. government. Many programs, including NIH funding, are facing budget cuts.
- Martin Fenner of the PLoS blog Gobbledygook discussed strategies for discovering conversations about new scientific articles using blog aggregators and microformats.
- The Scholary Kitchen posted about a new report on peer review from The Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley. “If there is a general theme in this report, it is that academic publishing has yoked a system of distribution (journal and scholarly book publishing) to a system of evaluation (promoting and rewarding faculty), and that this coupling has resulted in a dysfunctional system.”
- James Gleick’s new book The Information was reviewed in the New York Times last Sunday.