Video: Amazing Ad from Japanese Confectioner Glico Stars 72 Actresses Each Showing One Year of A Woman’s Life in One Second

About 100 years ago, the global average life expectancy was only 31 years.

Today, it has increased to 71.8 years.

The heroine, who turns a year older every second, is played by 72 actresses from 0 to 71 years old (their actual age).

Watch video at You Tube (1:38 minutes) . . . . .

Spanish Tapa with Meatballs and Olives

Ingredients

2 oz day-old bread, crusts removed
3 tbsp water
1-1/8 cups lean fresh ground pork
1-1/8 cups lean fresh ground lamb
2 small onions, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1 egg, lightly beaten
all-purpose flour, for dusting
3 tbsp olive oil
1 can (14 oz) chopped tomatoes
5 tbsp dry sherry or red wine
pinch of hot or sweet smoked paprika
pinch of sugar
1 cup cracked green olives in extra virgin olive oil
salt
crusty bread, to serve

Method

1. Put the bread in a bowl, then add the water and let soak for 30 minutes.
2. Using your hands, squeeze out as much of the water as possible from the bread and put the bread in a clean bowl.
3. Add the ground meat, 1 chopped onion, 2 crushed garlic cloves, the cumin, coriander, and egg to the bread. Season to taste with salt and, using your hands, mix together well.
4. Dust a plate or cookie sheet with flour. Using floured hands, roll the mixture into 30 equal-size, small balls, then put on the plate or cookie sheet and roll lightly in the flour.
5. Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in a large skillet, then add the meatballs, in batches to avoid overcrowding, and cook over medium heat, turning frequently, for 8-10 minutes, until golden brown on all sides and firm. Remove with a slotted spoon and set aside.
6. Heat the remaining oil in the skillet, then add the remaining onion and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes, or until softened but not browned.
7. Add the remaining garlic and cook, stirring, for 30 seconds. Add the tomatoes and their juice, sherry, paprika, and sugar and season to taste with salt. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 10 minutes.
8. Using a hand-held blender, blend the tomato mixture until smooth. Return the sauce to the pan.
9. Carefully return the meatballs to the skillet and add the olives. Simmer gently for 20 minutes, or until the meatballs are tender.
10. Serve hot, with crusty bread to mop up the sauce.

Cook’s tip

Cracked green olives are made by cracking unripe green olives and putting them in water for several weeks to remove their bitterness, then storing them in brine. If you are unable to find these, green olives in extra virgin olive oil could be used instead.

Makes 6 servings as part of a tapas meal.

Source: Tapas

What’s for Lunch?

Horse Meat Rice Bowl Set Lunch

The lunch is on the menu of Hanabi Restaurant in Ginza, Japan and the cost is 1,480 yen plus tax.

The meat is from horse raised at the farm in the Kumamoto Prefecture.

New Prostate Cancer Risk Model Developed

One of the biggest challenges in treating prostate cancer is distinguishing men who have aggressive and potentially lethal disease from men whose cancer is slow-growing and unlikely to metastasize.

For years, prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level, cancer grade and tumor stage have been used to sort prostate cancer patients into risk groups established by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. These risk groups help determine treatment course.

But the longtime practice has shortcomings.

“These risk groups were developed decades ago and were optimized for what is called biochemical recurrence, which simply means that a man’s PSA level rises again sometime after treatment,” says Daniel Spratt, M.D., associate chair of research and assistant professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Michigan Medicine.

“It was not optimized for more meaningful outcomes like identifying which men will ultimately develop metastases or die of prostate cancer.”

That means men with prostate cancer are being left behind in the era of precision medicine, Spratt says.

The good news? Technology has advanced to the point where genetic information derived from tissue biopsied at diagnosis can much more accurately predict which men have aggressive prostate cancer. A genomic classifier score is assigned based on tests run on 22 genes known to increase the risk of developing metastatic disease.

The bad news? There has been no way to integrate these new gene expression biomarker risk scores into the NCCN risk groups that have traditionally been used to guide treatment.

“So what we did is basically say: We’ve got a flawed model,” says Spratt. “We’ve got these new biomarkers, but we don’t really know how to integrate them. Let’s see if we can merge them together to create a new, integrated system that is simple and easy to use, and standardize the use of these biomarkers.”

The study was reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

New reporting methods

Four multicenter, retrospective cohorts of nearly 7,000 men, all of whom had gene expression biomarker scores, were used to design, test and validate a new model for assigning risk groups. Two new clinical-genomic systems were created: a simple three-tiered system and a more granular six-tiered system.

When the researchers tested the new risk group models against conventional NCCN risk groups for the development of metastatic disease and death from prostate cancer, they found that the new clinical-genomic groups were much more accurate predictors than the traditional NCCN risk groups.

The team also found some noticeable differences.

“What our new system does is not only more accurately identify men who have either indolent disease or aggressive disease, but it reclassifies almost 67 percent of men, potentially changing recommendations for their treatment,” says Spratt.

Implications for care

For men with a lower-risk, slow-growing disease who are much more likely to die of something other than prostate cancer, active surveillance is typically recommended. Through careful monitoring of the condition, they are able to defer treatment.

“It’s great because you spare the cost and side effects of treatment,” says Spratt. “However, in the community setting, only about 50 percent or less of men who we would normally say should go on active surveillance actually go on it. That’s because clinicians don’t have great confidence in the old NCCN risk grouping system.”

This new system creates a much larger pool of low-risk men eligible for active surveillance, and it gives more accuracy and confidence to doctors prescribing treatment.

On the other hand, the new risk group classification also identifies a much larger pool of high-risk men who, if left untreated, are likely to die of prostate cancer. This group would receive more intensive treatment, possibly including radiation, hormone therapy or clinical trials.

“This is similar to what the oncotype recurrence score is for breast cancer,” Spratt says. “Women who have a high oncotype score are told they have a large chance of absolute benefit from adding chemotherapy, while those with a low oncotype score may have a very small benefit — but the absolute benefit is so small, it’s not worth the side effects and cost of the therapy.”

Spratt says this new clinical-genomic risk grouping system for prostate cancer is ready to be used today.

“This could radically change the way we perceive and treat localized prostate cancer,” he says.

Source: EurekAlert!

Higher Vitamin D Levels May be Linked to Lower Risk of Cancer

High levels of vitamin D may be linked to a lower risk of developing cancer, including liver cancer, concludes a large study of Japanese adults published by The BMJ.

The researchers say their findings support the theory that vitamin D might help protect against some cancers.

Vitamin D is made by the skin in response to sunlight. It helps to maintain calcium levels in the body to keep bones, teeth and muscles healthy. While the benefits of vitamin D on bone diseases are well known, there is growing evidence that Vitamin D may benefit other chronic diseases, including some cancers.

But so far, most studies have been carried out in European or American populations, and evidence from Asian populations is limited.

As Vitamin D concentrations and metabolism can vary by ethnicity, it is important to find out whether similar effects would be seen in non-Caucasian populations.

So an international research team, based in Japan, set out to assess whether vitamin D was associated with the risk of total and site specific cancer.

They analysed data from the Japan Public Health Center-based Prospective (JPHC) Study, involving 33,736 male and female participants aged between 40 to 69 years.

At the start of the study, participants provided detailed information on their medical history, diet and lifestyle, and blood samples were taken to measure vitamin D levels.

Vitamin D levels varied depending on the time of year the sample was taken, tending to be higher during the summer and autumn months than in the winter or spring.

After accounting for this seasonal variation, samples were split into four groups, ranging from the lowest to highest levels of vitamin D.

Participants were then monitored for an average of 16 years, during which time 3,301 new cases of cancer were recorded.

After adjusting for several known cancer risk factors, such as age, weight (BMI), physical activity levels, smoking, alcohol intake and dietary factors, the researchers found that a higher level of vitamin D was associated with a lower (around 20%) relative risk of overall cancer in both men and women.

Higher vitamin D levels were also associated with a lower (30-50%) relative risk of liver cancer, and the association was more evident in men than in women.

No association was found for lung or prostate cancer, and the authors note that none of the cancers examined showed an increased risk associated with higher vitamin D levels.

Findings were largely unchanged after accounting for additional dietary factors and after further analyses to test the strength of the results.

The researchers point to some study limitations, for example numbers of organ specific cancers were relatively small. And while they adjusted for several known risk factors, they cannot rule out the possibility that other unmeasured (confounding) factors may have influenced the results, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions about cause and effect.

Nevertheless, key strengths include the large sample size for overall cancer, a long follow-up period and the large number of blood samples analysed.

The authors say their findings support the theory that vitamin D may protect against the risk of cancer, but that there may be a ceiling effect, which may suggest that there are no additional benefits beyond a certain level of vitamin D.

“Further studies are needed to clarify the optimal concentrations [of vitamin D] for cancer prevention.” they conclude.

Source: EurekAlert!

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