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Health

Ultraprocessed foods linked to ovarian and other cancer deaths, study finds

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CNN
 — 

Eating more ultraprocessed foods raises the risk of developing and dying from cancer, especially ovarian cancer, according to a new study of over 197,000 people in the United Kingdom, over half of whom were women.

Overly processed foods include prepackaged soups, sauces, frozen pizza and ready-to-eat meals, as well as hot dogs, sausages, french fries, sodas, store-bought cookies, cakes, candies, doughnuts, ice cream and many more.

“Ultra-processed foods are produced with industrially derived ingredients and often use food additives to adjust colour, flavour, consistency, texture, or extend shelf life,” said first author Dr. Kiara Chang, a National Institute for Health and Care Research fellow at Imperial College London’s School of Public Health, in a statement.

“Our bodies may not react the same way to these ultra-processed ingredients and additives as they do to fresh and nutritious minimally processed foods,” Chang said.

However, people who eat more ultra-processed foods also tend to “drink more fizzy drinks and less tea and coffee, as well as less vegetables and other foods associated with a healthy dietary pattern,” said Duane Mellor, a registered dietitian and senior teaching fellow at Aston Medical School in Birmingham, UK, in an email.

“This could mean that it may not be an effect specifically of the ultra-processed foods themselves, but instead reflect the impact of a lower intake of healthier food,” said Mellor, who was not involved in the study.

The study, published Tuesday in the journal eClinicalMedicine, looked at the association between eating ultraprocessed foods and 34 different types of cancer over a 10-year period.

Researchers examined information on the eating habits of 197,426 people who were part of the UK Biobank, a large biomedical database and research resource that followed residents from 2006 to 2010.

The amount of ultraprocessed foods consumed by people in the study ranged from a low of 9.1% to a high of 41.4% of their diet, the study found.

Eating patterns were then compared with medical records that listed both diagnoses and deaths from cancer.

Each 10% increase in ultraprocessed food consumption was associated with a 2% increase in developing any cancer, and a 19% increased risk for being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, according to a statement issued by Imperial College London.

Deaths from cancers also increased, the study found. For each additional 10% increase in ultraprocessed food consumption, the risk of dying from any cancer increased by 6%, while the risk of dying from ovarian cancer rose by 30%, according to the statement.

“These associations persisted after adjustment for a range of socio-demographic, smoking status, physical activity, and key dietary factors,” the authors wrote.

When it comes to death from cancer among women, ovarian cancer is ranked fifth, “accounting for more deaths than any other cancer of the female reproductive system,” noted the American Cancer Society.

“The findings add to previous studies showing an association between a greater proportion of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in the diet and a higher risk of obesity, heart attacks, stroke, and type 2 diabetes,” said Simon Steenson, a nutrition scientist at the British Nutrition Foundation, a charity partially supported by food producers and manufacturers. Steenson was not involved in the new study.

“However, an important limitation of these previous studies and the new analysis published today is that the findings are observational and so do not provide evidence of a clear causal link between UPFs and cancer, or the risk of other diseases,” Steenson said in an email.

People who ate the most ultraprocessed foods “were younger and less likely to have a family history of cancer,” Chang and her colleagues wrote.

High consumers of ultraprocessed foods were less likely to do physical activity and more likely to be classified as obese. These people were also likely to have lower household incomes and education and live in the most underprivileged communities, the study found.

“This study adds to the growing evidence that ultra-processed foods are likely to negatively impact our health including our risk for cancer,” said Dr. Eszter Vamos, the study’s lead author and a clinical senior lecturer at Imperial College London’s School of Public Health in a statement.

This latest research is not the first to show an association between a high intake of ultraprocessed foods and cancer.

A 2022 study examined the diets of over 200,000 men and women in the United States for up to 28 years and found a link between ultraprocessed foods and colorectal cancer — the third most diagnosed cancer in the United States — in men, but not women.

And there are “literally hundreds of studies (that) link ultraprocessed foods to obesity, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and overall mortality,” Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University told CNN previously.

While the new UK-based study cannot prove causation, only an association, “other available evidence shows that reducing ultra-processed foods in our diet could provide important health benefits,” Vamos said.

“Further research is needed to confirm these findings and understand the best public health strategies to reduce the widespread presence and harms of ultra-processed foods in our diet,” she added.

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Health

US cancer death rate drops 33% since 1991, partly due to advances in treatment, early detection and less smoking, new report says

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CNN
 — 

The rate of people dying from cancer in the United States has continuously declined over the past three decades, according to a new report from the American Cancer Society.

The US cancer death rate has fallen 33% since 1991, which corresponds to an estimated 3.8 million deaths averted, according to the report, published Thursday in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. The rate of lives lost to cancer continued to shrink in the most recent year for which data is available, between 2019 and 2020, by 1.5%.

The 33% decline in cancer mortality is “truly formidable,” said Karen Knudsen, chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society.

The report attributes this steady progress to improvements in cancer treatment, drops in smoking and increases in early detection.

“New revelations for prevention, for early detection and for treatment have resulted in true, meaningful gains in many of the 200 diseases that we call cancer,” Knudsen said.

In their report, researchers from the American Cancer Society also pointed to HPV vaccinations as connected to reductions in cancer deaths. HPV, or human papillomavirus, infections can cause cervical cancer and other cancer types, and vaccination has been linked with a decrease in new cervical cancer cases.

Among women in their early 20s, there was a 65% drop in cervical cancer rates from 2012 through 2019, “which totally follows the time when HPV vaccines were put into use,” said Dr. William Dahut, the society’s chief scientific officer.

“There are other cancers that are HPV-related – whether that’s head and neck cancers or anal cancers – so there’s optimism this will have importance beyond this,” he said.

The lifetime probability of being diagnosed with any invasive cancer is estimated to be 40.9% for men and 39.1% for women in the US, according to the new report.

The report also includes projections for 2023, estimating that there could be nearly 2 million new cancer cases – the equivalent of about 5,000 cases a day – and more than 600,000 cancer deaths in the United States this year.

During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, many people skipped regular medical exams, and some doctors have seen a rise in advanced cancer cases in the wake of pandemic-delayed screenings and treatment.

The American Cancer Society researchers were not able to track “that reduction in screening that we know we all observed across the country during the pandemic,” Knudsen said. “This time next year, I believe our report will give some initial insight into what the impact was in the pandemic of cancer incidence and cancer mortality.”

The new report includes data from national programs and registries, including those at the National Cancer Institute, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries.

Data showed that the US cancer death rate rose during most of the 20th century, largely due to an increase in lung cancer deaths related to smoking. Then, as smoking rates fell and improvements in early detection and treatments for some cancers increased, there was a decline in the cancer death rate from its peak in 1991.

Since then, the pace of the decline has slowly accelerated.

The new report found that the five-year relative survival rate for all cancers combined has increased from 49% for diagnoses in the mid-1970s to 68% for diagnoses during 2012-18.

The cancer types that now have the highest survival rates are thyroid at 98%, prostate at 97%, testis at 95% and melanoma at 94%, according to the report.

Current survival rates are lowest for cancers of the pancreas, at 12%.

The finding about a decreasing cancer death rate shows “the continuation of good news,” said Dr. Otis Brawley, an oncology professor at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the research.

“The biggest reason for the decline that started in 1991 was the prevalence of smoking in the United States started going down in 1965,” said Brawley, a former chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.

“That’s the reason why we started having a decline in 1991, and that decline has continued because the prevalence of people smoking in the United States has continued to go down,” he said. “Now, in certain diseases, our ability to treat has improved, and there are some people who are not dying because of treatment.”

Although the death rate for cancer has been on a steady decline, the new report also highlights that new cases of breast, uterine and prostate cancer have been “of concern” and rising in the United States.

Incidence rates of breast cancer in women have been increasing by about 0.5% per year since the mid-2000s, according to the report.

Uterine corpus cancer incidence has gone up about 1% per year since the mid-2000s among women 50 and older and nearly 2% per year since at least the mid-1990s in younger women.

The prostate cancer incidence rate rose 3% per year from 2014 through 2019, after two decades of decline.

Knudsen called prostate cancer “an outlier” since its previous decline in incidence has reversed, appearing to be driven by diagnoses of advanced disease.

On Thursday, the American Cancer Society announced the launch of the Impact initiative, geared toward improving prostate cancer incidence and death rates by funding new research programs and expanding support for patients, among other efforts.

“Unfortunately, prostate cancer remains the number one most frequently diagnosed malignancy amongst men in this country, with almost 290,000 men expected to be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year,” Knudsen said. Cancer diagnosed when it is confined to the prostate has a five-year survival rate of “upwards of 99%,” she said, but for metastatic prostate cancer, there is no durable cure.

“Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death for men in this country,” she said. “What we’re reporting is not only an increase in the incidence of prostate cancer across all demographics but a 5% year-over-year increase in diagnosis of men with more advanced disease. So we are not catching these cancers early when we have an opportunity to cure men of prostate cancer.”

Breast, uterine and prostate cancers also have a wide racial disparity, in which communities of color have higher death rates and lower survival rates.

In 2020, the risk of overall cancer death was 12% higher in Black people compared with White people, according to the new report.

“Not every individual or every family is affected equally,” Knudsen said.

For instance, “Black men unfortunately have a 70% increase in incidence of prostate cancer compared to White men and a two- to four-fold increase in prostate cancer mortality as related to any other ethnic and racial group in the United States,” she said.

The data in the new report demonstrates “important and consistent” advances against cancer, Dr. Ernest Hawk, vice president of cancer prevention and population sciences at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, said in an email.

“Cancer is preventable in many instances and detectable at an early stage with better outcomes in many others. When necessary, treatments are improving in both their efficacy and safety. That’s all great news,” Hawk wrote.

“However, it’s well past time for us to take health inequities seriously and make them a much greater national priority. Inequities in cancer risks, cancer care and cancer outcomes are intolerable, and we should not be complacent with these regular reminders of avoidable inequities,” he said. “With deliberate and devoted effort, I believe we can eliminate these disparities and make even greater progress to end cancer.”

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Entertainment

Andy Taylor, former Duran Duran guitarist, has stage four cancer

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London
CNN
 — 

Andy Taylor, guitarist with British New Romantic group Duran Duran at the height of their fame, is battling stage four prostate cancer.

The band made the announcement on Saturday as they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame during a ceremony at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.

Taylor, who did not join his former bandmates John Taylor, Simon Le Bon, Roger Taylor and Nick Rhodes at the Class of 2022 celebrations due to ongoing treatment, wrote a letter to mark the occasion.

In the note, parts of which were read out by frontman Le Bon, Taylor disclosed that he had received his diagnosis four years ago and spoke of his delight at being inducted into the hall of fame.

“There’s nothing that comes close to such recognition. You can dream about what happened to us but to experience it, on one’s own terms, as mates, was beyond incredible,” Taylor wrote in the message relayed by Le Bon.

Touching on his health issues, the 61-year-old Taylor added: “Many families have experienced the slow burn of this disease and of course, we are no different; so I speak from the perspective of a family man but with profound humility to the band, the greatest fans a group could have and this exceptional accolade.”

Taylor joined Duran Duran in April 1980 and left in 1986 to pursue a solo career. He then rejoined in 2001 for a string of successful concerts and their 2004 album “Astronaut” before quitting again in 2006.

Taylor said he was “massively disappointed” to miss the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame show, which was set to be his first time performing with the group in 16 years, and that he had “bought a new guitar” for the occasion.

“I’m so very proud of these four brothers, I’m amazed at their durability, and I’m overjoyed at accepting this award,” Taylor said. “I often doubted the day would come. I’m sure as hell glad I’m around to see the day.”

In the letter later shared in full on the band’s website, Taylor said his condition was incurable, but that he was receiving “sophisticated life-extending treatment” that had allowed him to “just rock on” until recent times when he suffered a “setback.”

“Although my current condition is not immediately life-threatening there is no cure,” he said.

According to the American Cancer Society, about one in eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during his lifetime.

Reacting to Taylor’s health update on Saturday, Le Bon said: “It is devastating news to know and find out that a colleague… Not a colleague, a mate, a friend, one of our family is not going to be around for very long. It’s absolutely devastating. We love Andy dearly and you know, I’m not going to stand here and cry. I don’t think that would be very appropriate but that’s what I feel like.”

Duran Duran formed in 1978 and topped the US singles charts in the 1980s with their hits “The Reflex” and “A View to a Kill.”

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Business

Gepotidacin: New antibiotic appears to be effective against UTIs, company says

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CNN
 — 

The first new type of antibiotic developed in more than 20 years to treat urinary tract infections (UTIs) appears to be so effective that the pharmaceutical company stopped testing and will soon submit its data to the US Food and Drug Administration for approval.

Drug company GSK said Thursday the new antibiotic, called gepotidacin, works at least as well as nitrofurantoin, a current front-line medication used to treat UTIs.

The company said it would follow a recommendation from its independent data monitoring committee to stop the study early because the drug had already proven to be effective.

GSK said it would prepare its findings for publication in a medical journal and submit its data to the FDA for approval next year. That’s about a year ahead of the study’s anticipated completion date on the website clinicaltrials.gov.

“Stopping studies in such circumstances is a pretty rare occurrence in the industry. So it’s something I’m absolutely delighted about, both from public health and from a company perspective,” said GSK Chief Scientific Officer Tony Wood, on a call with reporters, Thursday.

Gepotidacin works by blocking enzymes that bacteria need to unzip their DNA – their operating instructions – so they can multiply in the body.

It was developed in partnership with the US government, as one of 19 projects currently funded by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, to combat antimicrobial resistance. Government investment was needed because new drugs are expensive to develop, and antibiotics tend not to turn large profits.

New antibiotics are desperately needed because over time, many kinds of bacteria have become resistant to the agents used to treat them. A 2021 report from the World Health Organization warned there are not enough new antibiotics in development to overcome the looming threat of antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistant infections kill more than a million people globally each year.

“It’s definitely a big deal,” said Dr. Cindy Liu, chief medical officer at the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University.

“The antibiotic pipeline is what we would call pretty leaky, because, you know, you end up with antibiotics dropping out,” Liu said, meaning many of the drugs don’t make it from the first to second phase of human trials. Another round will drop out between the second and third phase, typically because companies run out of funds to develop them. ” And so this is something that we’ve been dealing with, at the same time when there are increasing numbers of infections that are harder and harder to treat with the drugs that we do have.”

Liu said getting marketing approval for gepotidacin was just the first hurdle. She said she’s seen drugs win approval, only to be abandoned by their manufacturers when they don’t turn a profit.

Antibiotics don’t generate large profits for pharmaceutical companies because patients only take them for a short time. They aren’t maintenance medications like drugs for cholesterol or depression. Eventually, if they are used enough, the bacteria they were developed to kill will develop resistance to them, and the drugs will stop working. So they have a limited lifespan.

“I think it will be really interesting and important to the field to see both how the drug companies sort of market this product and sort of how it does,” Liu said.

Urinary tract infections can happen to both men and women of any age, but are more common in women and girls, who have shorter urethras that are closer to the rectum, making it easier for bacteria to infect the urinary tract.

UTIs are one of the most common infections. Studies show they afflict 1 in 8 women each year and 1 in 5 women over age 65. Somewhere between 30% to 44% of UTIs are recurrent, meaning they come back after treatment. Most are caused by E. coli bacteria, which are becoming more resistant to the drugs used to treat them.

Symptoms of UTIs include frequent urination that is painful or burns, bloody urine, low stomach cramps and the need to urinate even after having just gone.

In clinical trials of 3,000 women, GSK said gepotidacin met its goals of both resolving the symptoms of a UTI as well as clearing the bacteria causing it. The study compared gepotidacin to nitrofurantoin, which is currently recommended as a first-line therapy.

Gepotidacin is taken as a pill. GSK is also testing it to treat the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea. On Thursday, GSK said the study testing gepotidacin for gonorrhea was ongoing and had not yet progressed to the same stage as the UTI trial.

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Health

US woman files lawsuit against L’Oréal, claiming chemical hair straightening products are linked to her cancer

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CNN
 — 

Cosmetics company L’Oréal, along with multiple other parties, is being sued over claims that its chemical hair straightening products put women at an increased risk of uterine cancer.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, counsel Diandra “Fu” Debrosse Zimmermann and others filed a lawsuit Friday in Illinois on behalf of 32-year-old Missouri resident Jenny Mitchell, claiming that Mitchell’s uterine cancer “was directly and proximately caused by her regular and prolonged exposure to phthalates and other endocrine disrupting chemicals found in Defendants’ hair care products.”

CNN has contacted L’Oréal, Namaste Laboratories LLC, Dabur International Ltd. and Godrej Consumer Products, parent company of the Just For Me brand, for comment.

Debrosse Zimmermann told CNN on Monday that the lawsuit marks a “watershed moment” for women of color who have used chemical hair-straightening products, such as relaxers.

At a news conference Monday, Mitchell said that she recalls getting hair relaxers around third grade, when she was about 8 years old.

Mitchell was diagnosed with uterine cancer on August 10, 2018, according to the lawsuit, and underwent a full hysterectomy at Boone Hospital Center in Missouri on September 24, 2018.

“At that time, at the age of 28, my dreams of becoming a mother were gone,” she said. In the lawsuit, she claims to have no family history of cancer or uterine cancer.

“As most young African-American girls, chemical relaxers, chemical straighteners were introduced to us at a young age,” Mitchell said. “Society has made it a norm to look a certain way, in order to feel a certain way. And I am the first voice of many voices to come that will stand, stand up to these companies, and say, ‘No more.’”

Mitchell continued using chemical hair-straightening products from around 2000 until March 2022, and she is seeking compensation in excess of $75,000, according to the lawsuit.

Two other individual cases have been filed – in California and New York – against cosmetic companies, including L’Oreal, claiming a connection between chemical hair-straightening products and cancer diagnoses, Debrosse Zimmermann said.

“We imagine that we will continue representing additional women in filing cases, as will other firms, and more and more women will come forward,” she said.

Mitchell’s lawsuit was filed just days after the publication of a study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, which estimates that among women who frequently use hair-straightening chemical products, the risk of developing uterine cancer by age 70 is around 4%. In women who did not use hair-straightening chemical products in the previous 12 months, the study estimates the risk of developing uterine cancer by age 70 to be 1.6%.

Black women tend to use these chemical hair-straightening products more frequently than White women, the researchers noted.

The study data showed that the association between hair straightening products and uterine cancer cases was most pronounced for Black women, who made up only 7.4% of the study participants, but 59.9% of those who reported ever using straighteners.

Several factors probably play a role in the frequent use of hair straightening products: Eurocentric standards of beauty and social pressures placed on Black and Latina women in workplace settings related to microaggressions and the threat of discrimination, along with desired versatility in changing hairstyles and self-expression.

“Black women have long been the victims of dangerous products specifically marketed to them,” Crump said in a news release. “Black hair has been and always will be beautiful, but Black women have been told they have to use these products to meet society’s standards. We will likely discover that Ms. Mitchell’s tragic case is one of countless cases in which companies aggressively misled black women to increase their profits.”

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Health

Hair-straightening chemical products linked to increased uterine cancer risk in new study

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CNN
 — 

Scientists are uncovering new details in the connection between using certain hair straightening products, such as chemical relaxers and pressing products, and an increased risk of cancer in women.

Ongoing research previously suggested that hair straightening chemicals are associated with an increased risk of certain hormone-related cancers, including breast and ovarian cancers, and now, a new study links use of hair straightening products with an increased risk of uterine cancer. Black women may be more affected due to higher use of the products, the researchers noted.

The study, published Monday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, estimates that among women who did not use hair-straightening chemical products in the past 12 months, 1.6% developed uterine cancer by age 70, but about 4% of the women who frequently use such hair-straightening products developed uterine cancer by age 70.

That finding “also communicates that uterine cancer is indeed rare. However, the doubling of risk does lead to some concern,” said Chandra Jackson, an author of the study and researcher at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

“In this study, women with frequent use in the past year had an over two-fold higher risk of uterine cancer,” she said. Frequent use was defined as more than four times in the previous year.

The new study includes data on nearly 34,000 women in the United States, ages 35 to 74, who completed questionnaires about their use of certain hair products, including perms, dyes, relaxers and straighteners. The researchers, from the National Institutes of Health, also tracked the incidence of cancer diagnoses within the study group.

The researchers found a strong association between hair straightening products and uterine cancer cases but the use of other hair products – such as dyes and perms or body waves – was not associated with uterine cancer.

The study data also showed that the association between hair straightening products and uterine cancer cases was most pronounced for Black women, who made up only 7.4% of the study participants, but 59.9% of those who reported ever using straighteners.

Several factors likely play a role in the frequent use of hair straightening products: Eurocentric standards of beauty, social pressures placed on Black and Latina women in workplace settings related to microaggressions and the threat of discrimination, along with desired versatility in changing hairstyles and self-expression.

“The bottom line is that the exposure burden appears higher among Black women,” Jackson said.

“Based off of the body of the literature in this area, we know that hair products marketed directly to Black children and women have been shown to contain multiple chemicals associated with disrupting hormones, and these products marketed to Black women have also been shown to have harsher chemical formulations,” she said. “On top of that, we know that Black women tend to use multiple products simultaneously, which could contribute to Black women on average having higher concentrations of these hormone-disrupting chemicals in their system.”

The researchers did not collect information on brands or ingredients in the hair products the women used, but they wrote in the paper that several chemicals identified in straighteners could contribute to the increased incidence of uterine cancer observed in their study.

“To our knowledge this is the first epidemiologic study that examined the relationship between straightener use and uterine cancer,” Alexandra White, head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Environment and Cancer Epidemiology group and lead author on the study, said in a news release Monday.

“More research is needed to confirm these findings in different populations, to determine if hair products contribute to health disparities in uterine cancer, and to identify the specific chemicals that may be increasing the risk of cancers in women.”

Some substances found in hair-straightening products, especially those most used by and marketed to Black and Latina women, are hormone-disrupting chemicals, said Tamarra James-Todd, an epidemiologist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who was not involved in the new study but separately has led some of the earliest research finding links between hair products and cancer.

“They modify our body’s normal hormonal processes. So, it makes sense to look at cancers that are hormonally mediated,” she said, adding that hormone-disrupting chemicals could impact other parts of the body too.

“​The challenge is that the impact of these chemicals might not be limited to hormonal processes, but they could also impact other systems, including our immune and vascular systems. Understanding how these chemicals work beyond the hormonal system is still a new and growing area of research,” James-Todd told CNN.

“So, it could be that the way these chemicals are operating is through altering ​not only hormonal responses, but also by altering immune or even vascular responses,” she said. “All of these processes are linked to cancer.”

While the new study is “well done” and shows an association between hair-straightening chemical products and increased uterine cancer risk, it is unable to determine that the products directly cause the cancer, Dr. Otis Brawley, professor at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and former chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, said in an email to CNN.

“It is unable to show cause, it could be pure association,” said Brawley, who was not involved in the new study.

Yet “the question how do we settle this is difficult. The scientific ideal is a randomized trial of 40,000 or so; 20,000 with regular hair straightener use and 20,000 never using it and never having used it and follow them for 20 years,” he said, adding that at this point, “it’s impossible for science to answer better than” the recent study.

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