Hope for Cancer

Two encouraging reports on cancer: Hormones & Vitamins. Reporting on the work of Manhattan's Memorial Hospital, world's No. 1 cancer clinic, Director Cornelius Rhoads discussed two frontal attacks on the disease:

> Certain types of cancer in mice, especially breast, are caused by "poisonous" hormones brewed in the endocrine glands along with normal hormones. Problem is to discover what these cancer-causing hormones are. New, hitherto undescribed glandular substances have been isolated from the urine of patients. This may in time "provide a technique of almost unimaginable scope" for: 1) investigating cancer in early stages by examining urine; 2) treating the cancer by neutralizing abnormal hormones.

> Vitamins may play an accessory role in the treatment of cancer. Patients with cancer of the stomach are unable to distribute vitamin A through the blood stream the way normal persons do. The cancer cells seem to devour the vitamin. Patients with leukemia, a cancer of the white blood cells, have a much higher amount of vitamin B1 in these cells than do normal persons. Conclusion: there may be a way to starve cancer cells by depriving them of the vitamins they especially need. Dr. Rhoads hinted at the startling discovery of a chemical which in the test tube strangles cancer cells without disturbing the normal cells.

Stomach cancer, most widespread form of the malady, is not so hopeless a disease as most physicians believe. So wrote the Mayo Clinic's Surgeon Walter Alvarez in The Journal of Digestive Diseases last week. In reviewing "a remarkable study" of 10,980 cases of stomach cancer (compiled by Drs. Waltman Walters, Howard K. Gray, J. T. Priestley) which were treated at the Mayo Clinic from 1907 to 1938. Surgeon Alvarez pointed out that: 1) 24% of all patients who were operated upon recovered completely from the disease; 2) the percentage of cures rose to 60% for those who went under the knife early. If the cancer does not return within five years after the operation, said Dr. Alvarez, the chances are that it never will. The recovery figures, he added, could be "greatly improved" if middle-aged people would go to their doctors as soon as they have these symptoms: indigestion, loss of weight, vomiting, pain in the pit of the stomach.

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