Author: Jonathan Block

Jonathan Block

Jonathan Block is a freelance writer and former MedShadow content editor. He has been an editor and writer for multiple pharmaceutical, health and medical publications, including BioCentury, The Pink Sheet, Modern Healthcare, Health Plan Week and Psychiatry Advisor. He holds a BA from Tufts University and is earning an MPH with a focus on health policy from the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy.

What could be negative about an at-home test that can determine if you are at elevated risk for developing several types of cancer? It turns out, plenty. If you could take a test and have it determine whether you are at an elevated risk for developing breast cancer, who wouldn’t want to know such valuable information? And what if you could do it in the comfort of your home, without a prescription? That’s the crux behind 23andMe’s at-home genetic test, which the FDA just approved yesterday. While at first glance the test seems like a real breakthrough and a new…

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Almost half of women undergoing treatment for breast cancer experience side effects. Researchers in a study asked 1,945 women with early-stage breast cancer about 7 treatment side effects: nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, pain, arm swelling, shortness of breath and breast skin irritation. About 45% reported at least one of the side effects was severe or very severe. And when women got chemotherapy, the risk of severe side effects doubled. However, when chemo was conducted with radiation, the odds of severe side effects were just 30% higher. Posted January 24, 2017. Via Cancer. More than 1,500 additional cases of liver…

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Growing heart muscle cells from human stem cells can help determine whether cancer patients taking the chemotherapy agent doxorubicin are at risk of developing heart damage, a severe chemo side effect associated with the drug. Scientists at Stanford University say that new research conducted using heart muscle cells derived from women with breast cancer may one day help predict who should avoid doxorubicin. The new research is significant since, up until now, the only way to investigate the heart damage risk associated with the drug was through animal testing because obtaining human heart muscle tissues is difficult. Researchers collected skin…

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