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Instead of killing off cancer cells with toxic drugs, scientists have discovered a molecular pathway that forces them to grow old and die, they said on Wednesday.

Cancer cells spread and grow because they can divide indefinitely.

But a study in mice showed that blocking a cancer-causing gene called Skp2 forced cancer cells to go through an aging process known as senescence — the same process involved in ridding the body of cells damaged by sunlight.

If you block Skp2 in cancer cells, this process is triggered, Pier Paolo Pandolfi of Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues reported in the journal Nature.

And Takeda Pharmaceutical Co’s experimental cancer drug MLN4924 — already in early-stage clinical trials in people — appears to have the power to do just that, Pandolfi said in a telephone interview.

The finding may offer a new strategy for fighting cancer.

“What we discovered is if you damage cells, the cells have a built-in mechanism to put themselves out of business,” Pandolfi said. “They are stopped irreversibly from growing.”

For the study, the team used genetically altered mice that developed a form of prostate cancer.

In some of these, they inactivated the Skp2 gene. When the mice reached six months of age, they found those with an inactive Skp2 gene did not develop tumors, while the other mice did.

When they analyzed the tissues from lymph nodes and the prostate, they found many cells had started to age, and they also found a slow rate of cell division.

This was not the case in mice with normal Skp2 function.

They got a similar effect when they used the Skp2-blocking drug MLN4924 in lab cultures of human prostate cancer cells.

To see if this would work in mice, they transplanted the cells and treated the mice with the drug.

“We put human cancer cells into mice. We fed them with a drug and these cells do senesce (age),” Pandolfi said.

“The same mechanism of damage caused by the sun can be evoked pharmacologically in cancer cells.”

He said this Skp2-related aging pathway appears to be active in cancer, and not other cells. “We have no intention of aging the patient. But only the cancer,” he said.

(Editing by Todd Eastham)

About 20 percent of Americans have prediabetes and are at high risk for developing type 2 diabetes, the American Diabetes Association reports.

“Look around you. We are surrounded by [diabetes] risk,” Christine T. Tobin, president of health care and education at the American Diabetes Association, said in a news release. She said that Americans “need to change the future of diabetes now. One of the first steps is to find out if you or a loved one is at risk for developing type 2 diabetes by taking the Diabetes Risk Test. Knowing your risk can be the first step towards stopping this dreadful disease.”

The group is urging people to take the Diabetes Risk Test on March 23, the annual American Diabetes Association Alert Day. The test (available at stopdiabetes.com or 1-800-DIABETES) asks participants questions about weight, age, family history and other potential risk factors for type 2 diabetes. Based on their answers, participants are told whether they’re at low, moderate or high risk for diabetes. Those at high risk are encouraged to talk with their doctor.

Major risk factors for type 2 diabetes include being overweight, sedentary, over the age of 45 and having a family history of diabetes. Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders are at increased risk, as are women who’ve had gestational diabetes or have had a baby weighing more than 9 pounds at birth.

Left untreated, type 2 diabetes can lead to heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, eye damage or nerve damage that can lead to amputations.

If current trends continue, about one in three American children born today will develop diabetes. Of the approximately 24 million Americans with diabetes, nearly 6 million have type 2 diabetes and don’t know it.

“Studies have shown that type 2 diabetes can be prevented or delayed by losing just 5 to 7 percent of body weight through 30 minutes of regular physical activity, five days a week and healthy eating,” Tobin said. “We encourage everyone to gather their friends, family, loved ones and co-workers, and find ways to live healthier lifestyles today.”

SOURCE: American Diabetes Association, news release.

Less expensive physicians may not help reduce U.S. health-care costs, a new study suggests.

Insurance plans that use financial incentives and other methods to encourage patients to receive care from doctors who keep medical costs lower are becoming increasingly common. But these efforts may not be based on reliable estimates of doctor performance and may not achieve the intended savings, according to the RAND Corp., a non-profit research organization.

In the study, researchers looked at 13,788 physicians and found that about one-quarter of them would be misclassified under the system of cost-profiling commonly used by insurance plans.

“Our findings raise questions about the utility of cost-profiling tools for high-stakes activities such as tiered health plans and the likelihood that wide use of these strategies will reduce health-care spending,” study lead author John L. Adams, a senior statistician at RAND, said in a news release. “Consumers, physicians and those who pay for health care are all at risk of being misled by the results from these tools.”

Adams said these ranking systems may be useful for some purposes, such as warning physicians that their treatment methods appear to cost more than those used by their peers and suggesting they re-examine their practice styles.

However, the ranking systems “are not reliable enough at this point to make decisions about encouraging patients to see certain providers or excluding some doctors from insurance networks. Much work remains to be done to improve these systems before they are used for high-stakes activities,” Adams stated.

The findings are published in the issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

People with chronic low back pain that keeps them away from work can recover an average of four months earlier if they take part in a specific type of rehabilitation program, a new study suggests.

Researchers in the Netherlands and Canada studied 134 patients with chronic low back pain who hadn’t been able to go to work for about six months, on average. The patients, aged 18 to 65, were randomly assigned to receive usual care or to take part in a program called “integrated care.”

The integrated care program included adjustments made to the workplace environment and an exercise program that taught patients how to move safely and become more active.

Over a year, the patients who took part in the integrated care program returned to work after an average of 88 days instead of an average of 208 days for those who received usual care, according to the report published online March 17 in BMJ.

Although there were no statistically significant differences between the groups in reported levels of pain improvement, the study authors noted that the integrated care program significantly improved patients’ functional status and reduced their disability both at home and at work.

SOURCE: BMJ, news release.