A genetically modified purple tomato helped to prevent cancer in mice. The purple tomato is engineered to create nutrients which are found in dark berries. Scientists at the John Innes Center in Britain fed the modified tomato to cancer-prone mice and the tested mice lived longer than those fed a regular diet, with and without standard red tomatoes.

The clinical study was looking for the effects of anthocyanins, which are an antioxidant found in blackberries and black currants and have been shown to reduce cancer risk, some neurological conditions and heart disease.

Mesothelioma is a type of cancer which is almost always caused by an exposure to asbestos. The mesothelium is a part of the body which covers most of your vital organs. The most common area of the body that is affected by asbestos is the pleura, the lining between the lungs and the chest wall.

Exposure to asbestos can be as direct as working with asbestos laden construction materials to something as innocuous as washing the clothes of someone who does come into contact with the fibers. There are many things that you come into contact with everyday that might contain asbestos and most countries in the world have started to make its use something of the past.

Screening for cancer is the procedure that a doctor performs to check someone for cancer before he or she has any symptoms. Different types of cancer have different risk factors and populations that would prompt a doctor to screen for a certain type of cancer.

Of course, a long term smoker would be good candidate for lung cancer screening, and as men and women age, cancer screenings for breast cancer, cervical cancer, prostate cancer and skin cancer have become standard practice in preventative medicine.

If you have reached a certain age or have other high risk factors in your life, don’t be concerned that your doctor would like to screen for cancer, your doctor is just performing a normal course of preventative medicine.

These statistics are for the United States and list the 5 most common cancers that occur in the female population:

Breast Cancer 32%
Lung Cancer 12%
Colorectal Cancer 11%
Endometrial Cancer 6%
non-Hodgkin Lymphoma 4%

Next time we’ll look at some of the current cancer treatments that are used today, and some of the upcoming treatments that are in clinical trials.