From TheHill.com: The Wildfire Conservancy is conducting a first-of-a-kind cancer study on firefighters battling the Palisades Fire. The goal is to track how the extreme conditions increase firefighters’ risk of cancer. The study comes after the International Agency for Research on Cancer officially classified firefighting as a carcinogenic profession.

More than 30% of adults younger than age 50 believe that pancreatic cancer occurs only in older adults and more than 50% can’t name the early signs and symptoms of the disease, according to the results of a new survey conducted by researchers at The Ohio State University. The researchers called the knowledge gap “dangerous.”

By 2050, a projected 19 million males will be diagnosed with cancer annually and 10.5 million will die from the disease, according to the results of an international study published in Cancer. Those statistics represent an 85% and 93% increase, respectively.

Electronic health literacy, or ehealth literacy, can contribute to self-efficacy in community-dwelling older adults, a researcher reported in Clinical Gerontologist. The findings highlight how better electronic health literacy and self-efficacy can improve health outcomes and self-care in older adults who have a higher incidence of comorbidities.

Reading has always been a way for me to support well-being. On any given day, I typically have an audiobook for the car and long dog walks, a Kindle book for convenience, a “real book,” and some sort of spiritual reading. And I am thrilled to now have the opportunity to teach my two-year-old grandson about the wonders of the public library. 

Median prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels are lower in transgender women receiving estrogen than comparable cisgender men without a prostate cancer diagnosis, researchers reported in study findings published in JAMA, possibly because of the gender-affirming therapy’s castrating effects. The finding raises questions about the utility of PSA testing for transgender women with intact prostates.

Among the taxanes currently approved for breast cancer treatment, docetaxel is the preferred agent for Black patients with breast cancer, researchers concluded in study findings presented at the 2024 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting. In a study that only enrolled Black patients with breast cancer, the researchers found that docetaxel was associated with the lowest risk for taxane-induced peripheral neuropathy, a dose-limiting adverse event that typically occurs more frequently in Black individuals.

“The current body of research inadequately addresses the intersection of aging, health disparities, and cancer outcomes among older adults, highlighting the imperative for heightened attention, enhanced infrastructure, and collaborative efforts to fill this critical gap,” a team of expert investigators from across the United States reported in a scoping review published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

Confounding researchers and clinicians alike, colorectal cancer rates are dramatically increasing among younger populations. In the latest study results published in Gastroentrology, researchers quantified the drastic shift of colorectal cancer diagnoses in various young groups aged 10–24 years.

The risk of dying from cancer has steadily declined in the United States over the past few decades, but Black individuals assigned female at birth still have some of the lowest survival rates. Although Black females are less likely to be diagnosed with cancer than White females, they are they more likely to die from it within five years, according to the National Cancer Institute. The disparity is particularly stark for breast cancer, which kills Black females at a 40% higher rate than White females, even though their rate of diagnosis is 4% lower.