Ulcerative Colitis

George Loss, Martel's surgeon and the director of abdominal transplant at the Ochsner Multi-Organ Transplant Center, agreed that maintaining a close, supportive network eases many of the adjustments faced by transplant patients.

The Web site, Loss noted, is also a way to keep family close while limiting the patient's exposure to germs.Right now, Martel is confined to his home.

This is a way to reduce the risk of colds or flu that can pose problems to transplant recipients who take drugs that suppress their immune systems to lower the risk of rejection of the donor organ."The e-mails let me know that I'm not alone while I'm going through this," he said...

"People with these inflammatory disorders face up to 20 times the risk of going on to develop cancer," says principal investigator John D.

Potter, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Cancer Prevention Research Program in the Hutchinson Center's Division of Public Health Sciences.

"One of the reasons we have chosen to study these two cancers is because they are major public health problems; colorectal cancer because of its very high incidence and its relative preventibility, pancreas cancer because of its very high death rate," says Potter, also a professor of epidemiology at the UW.

Indeed, some 150,000 new cases of colorectal cancer are diagnosed annually in the United States, where it is the third most common type of cancer in men and women.

Pancreatic cancer, while less common, is almost uniformly fatal; the survival rate is about 5 percent, and most people die within four months of diagnosis.

Understanding what causes the progression of these inflammatory diseases to malignancy will be critical to designing effective strategies to prevent or delay the onset of these cancers.

This knowledge also could lead to the development of screening tests for pancreatic cancer (currently there are none) and more sensitive, les...

About 55,170 deaths are expected due to colorectal cancer this year.Source: American Cancer Society By IN-SUNG YOOThe News Journal 03/28/2006 Let's not beat around the bush: No one gets a colonoscopy for fun.

There's no end to the number of things we'd rather be doing than having a long, flexible tube inserted into our rectums and probing around our innards.

Sandra K.

Lehman certainly wasn't skipping on the way to her colonoscopy last May.

But after finding blood in her stool earlier in the year, the 65-year-old Bethany Beach resident had little choice.

When she was diagnosed with colorectal cancer, Lehman kicked herself for letting her unfounded fears about the screening procedure keep her from getting it done earlier.

Colorectal cancer is among the most preventable cancers, said Dr.

Richard Caruso, of Seaside Gastroenterology Consultants in Lewes.

When small growths in the colon, called polyps, are detected before they turn cancerous, the disease can be avoided.

When polyps are caught in ...