Alex was a beautiful, smart, brave, young girl who fought cancer 9 years.
She was in my ward in New Hampshire and has recently passed away due to a terminal brain cancer.
I wanted to post about her, because growing up in my ward she was always so happy, and had the biggest smile on her face even though she had been through so much in her short lifetime already. Her family has a blog about her, and it shows through her actions what a special girl she is! Her mom is an RN and speaks of the medical terminology of her condition. I am glad I am taking the DNA class, I now understand what is going on medically with her.
Living in the Boston area, I was privileged enough to tour the Boston Children's hospital research facility. Cancer is a top funded, and researched area in their labs. Dr. Faulkner was Surgeon General there for 14 years and after, became a surgical researcher. Angiogenesis was a hypothesis of his, that stated that a tumor attracts blood vessels to it, that will nourish it and allow it to grow. He guessed that if you get rid of the blood vessels, the tumor would wither and die.
I know for the past couple posts I have done things about cancer, and this post will probably be the most bounced around one of all, but since we have been learning about cancer, so many different things in my life that I have learned, or even wondered about have been about cancer. I think it is interesting the many studies that are going on since one man like Dr. Folkman even thought about angiogenesis.
SOOO angiogenesis how do we stop it? Dr. Folkman thought if you could stop the tumor from turning "on" you would stop it from growing.
1. Stop the switch
2. Testing is under development that would test blood or unine to check if angiogenesis has turned on.
3. delay the angiogenic switch--by giving naturally-occurring, nontoxic angiogenesis inhibitors preventively
Now there is a lot more going on, but these were some of the areas that were brought up on the tour.
Second to last post!!!
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