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    <recommendedItem id="20100101_19_250"
                     title="Cancer Research &quot;Giant&quot; Lawrence Garfinkel Dies at 88"
                     score="-0"
                     href="http://www.medpagetoday.com/Pulmonology/Smoking/tb/18108?impressionId=1265809966466"
                     
      &lt;p&gt;Epidemiologist Lawrence Garfinkel, MA, a legendary researcher for the American Cancer Society whose work helped establish a link between cancer and smoking and other activities, died of cardiovascular disease Thursday in Seattle, Washington at 88.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&quot;The American Cancer Society today mourns the loss of one of its most important historical figures,&quot; said John R. Seffrin, PhD, the society&apos;s chief executive officer.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&quot;Larry Garfinkel joined the American Cancer Society as a young scientist in 1947, and for more than four decades played an instrumental role in expanding knowledge of and reducing death from smoking.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Garfinkel&apos;s 1982 Cancer Prevention Study-II (CPS-II) is the largest contemporary study of tobacco and mortality, with 1.2 million participants and 77,000 data-compiling volunteers across 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;CPS-II uncovered the effects of lifestyle factors, such as obesity, alcohol consumption, medications, genetic elements, that affect cancer and other chronic diseases, the analysis of which still reveals important clues about cancer today.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The study also found lung cancer mortality rates in women increased five-fold from data collected in the original Cancer Prevention Study, while cancer rates among non-smoking women remained the same. This information provided strong evidence that lung cancer was almost exclusively a disease found in smokers.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Garfinkel was born on January 11, 1922 in Manhattan&apos;s Lower East Side and was raised in the South Bronx.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;He served in the army during World War II, where he was seriously injured in northern France in August, 1944.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, Garfinkel graduated from the City College of New York and received a Masters Degree from Columbia University. He also received several honorary doctorates.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Garfinkel began work for the ACS in 1947.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;He assisted E. Cuyler Hammond, MD, and Daniel Horn, MD, in the first ACS prospective mortality study of 187,783 males in the late 1940&apos;s by coordinating much of the field work, including training thousands of ACS volunteers in data collection techniques.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Garfinkel acted as the co-principal investigator of the larger Cancer Prevention Study I (CPS-I) in 1959. The study enrolled 1 million participants across 25 states and required over 68,000 volunteers to collect data.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In the 1960s, he contributed to more than two dozen major papers on the relation between smoking and health. He was co-author of one of the first reports combining epidemiology with pathology and provided some of the first direct evidence of lung damage related to smoking.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Garfinkel also contributed to issuance of the landmark 1964 Surgeon General&apos;s report on smoking and health.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;He was appointed director of ACS research in 1979 after Hammond&apos;s retirement.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Garfinkel retired from the ACS in 1989. Over the course of his career, he had contributed to more than 100 journal articles.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Richard D. Klausner, MD, then-director of the National Cancer Institute, said at the time: &quot;Few individuals have contributed as much to our present-day knowledge about the disease consequences of smoking.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&quot;His remarkable achievement is an important reminder what a tremendous impact an individual can make, and inspires all of us to continue the fight against cancer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Garfinkel continued to volunteer with the ACS after his retirement and taught biostatistics at the New York University Dental School.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;He is survived by his brothers, Harold and Melvin; his sons, Martin and Herb; a daughter-in-law, Margaret Cary, and two grandchildren.&lt;/p&gt;

    </recommendedItem>
    <recommendedItem id="20090101_19_554"
                     title="No Need for PSA Testing After Age 75"
                     score="-0.005"
                     href="http://www.medpagetoday.com/HematologyOncology/ProstateCancer/tb/12987?impressionId=1265809966466"
                     
      BALTIMORE, Feb. 20 -- PSA testing for prostate cancer can be safely discontinued at age 75 in men who have PSA values less than 3 ng/mL, data from a large cohort study suggest.
              &lt;p&gt; 
              &lt;p&gt;No prostate cancer deaths occurred in 75- to 80-year-old men with PSA values below that level, Edward M. Schaeffer, M.D., of Johns Hopkins, and colleagues reported online in the &lt;em&gt;Journal of Urology&lt;/em&gt;. 
              &lt;p&gt;Moreover, the time to death or diagnosis of aggressive prostate cancer was significantly longer in men with PSA values of &lt;3 ng/mL compared with those with values ?3 ng/mL. 
              &lt;p&gt;&quot;Men 75 to 80 years old with a prostate specific antigen less than 3 ng/mL are unlikely to die of or experience aggressive prostate cancer during their remaining life, suggesting that prostate specific antigen testing might be safely discontinued for these men,&quot; the authors concluded. 
              &lt;p&gt;The study was first reported at the 2008 meeting of the American Urological Association. (See: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/AUA/9600&quot;target=&quot;blank&quot;&gt;PSA Testing Might Not Be Necessary for Older Men&lt;/a&gt;) 
              &lt;p&gt;Older men with low-risk prostate cancer may have an increased risk of unnecessary treatment because of competing causes of death. High rates of PSA screening have been reported in men ages 85 and older, a group for whom treatment of prostate cancer is unlikely to alter mortality, the authors said. 
              &lt;p&gt;To investigate the potential risks of stopping PSA testing at age 75, the authors reviewed data on 849 men participating in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging. Median follow-up was 10 years during which the men had a median of four PSA tests. 
              &lt;p&gt;The study group included 122 men with prostate cancer and 727 men without prostate cancer. The latter group included 185 who had died during follow-up, 24 (3.3%) of whom had prostate cancer diagnosed at autopsy. 
              &lt;p&gt;Participants ranged in age from 40 to 92. 
              &lt;p&gt;The median PSA value at first visit was 0.76 ng/mL overall, 1.25 ng/mL in men with prostate cancer, and 0.7 ng/mL in those without prostate cancer (&lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt;=0.001). 
              &lt;p&gt;The median final PSA values were 1.5 ng/mL, 5.1 ng/mL, and 1.23 ng/mL (&lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt;=0.001). 
              &lt;p&gt;Median age at prostate cancer diagnosis was 72.7. Median age at death or censoring was 75.2 overall, 83.1 in men with prostate cancer, and 73.1 in men without prostate cancer (&lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt;&lt;0.001). 
              &lt;p&gt;The authors calculated the probability of developing high-risk prostate cancer in five-year increments, beginning at ages 60 to 65 and stratified by PSA values of &lt;1 ng/mL to &gt;3 ng/mL. 
              &lt;p&gt;They defined high-risk prostate cancer as death from prostate cancer, a PSA value &gt;20 ng/mL, or a Gleason score of ?8 at prostate cancer diagnosis. 
              &lt;p&gt;Of the 122 men with prostate cancer, 18 died of the disease and 17 had high-risk cancer. 
              &lt;p&gt;In the subgroup of 35 patients, all had one or more PSA values &gt;3 ng/mL during follow-up, compared with none of the 87 patients living with prostate cancer or the 727 prostate cancer-free patients. 
              &lt;p&gt;&quot;Men of all ages with a prostate specific antigen of 3.0 ng/mL or greater had a continually increasing probability of death from prostate cancer,&quot; the authors said. 
              &lt;p&gt;The researchers acknowledged that their study was limited by the use of frozen sera for PSA assay and the inability to assess the stage or grade of prostate cancer in the diagnosed cases. 
              &lt;p&gt;Also, they said, &quot;although a majority of deaths occurred at the beginning of the PSA era (early 1990s), the potential impact of treatment on prostate cancer mortality is unknown.&quot;  
              &lt;p&gt;Dr. Schaeffer disclosed a financial relationship with Covidien.
    </recommendedItem>
    <recommendedItem id="20090101_1_636"
                     title="ASTRO: Yearly PSA Screening Found to Cut Prostate Cancer Mortality"
                     score="-0.005"
                     href="