What we currently call breast cancer should be thought of as 10 completely separate diseases, according to an international study which has been described as a ‘landmark’.

The categories could improve treatment by tailoring drugs for a patient’s exact type of breast cancer and help predict survival more accurately.

The study in Nature analysed breast cancers from 2,000 women.

It will take at least three years for the findings to be used in hospitals.

Researchers compared breast cancer to a map of the world. They said tests currently used in hospitals were quite broad, splitting breast cancer up into the equivalent of continents.

The latest findings give the breast cancer map far more detail, allowing you to find individual ‘countries’.

‘Breast cancer is not one disease, but 10 different diseases,’ said lead researcher Prof Carlos Caldas.

The potential here is huge and it could have a transformative role in breast cancer care. However, we are a long way from using the new definitions in hospitals and the immediate impact on patients will be limited.

There are clear survival differences among the 10 categories. Clusters two and five seem to have a 15-year survival of around 40%. Clusters three and four have around 75% survival over the same period. […]

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NEW YORK — In writing about the relentless collapse of Western economies, I frequently point to ’40 years of plummeting wages’ for Western workers, in real dollars. However, where I have been remiss is in quantifying the magnitude of this collapse in Western wages.

On several occasions, I have glibly referred to how it now takes two spouses working to equal the wages of a one-income family of 40 years ago. Unfortunately, that is now an understatement. In fact, Western wages have plummeted so low that a two-income family is now (on average) 15% poorer than a one-income family of 40 years ago.

Regular readers will recognize the chart below on U.S. average wages.

Using the year 2000 as the numerical base from which to ‘zero’ all of the numbers, real wages peaked in 1970 at around $20/hour. Today the average worker makes $8.50/hour — more than 57% less than in 1970. And since the average wage directly determines the standard of living of our society, we can see that the average standard of living in the U.S. has plummeted by over 57% over a span of 40 years.

There are no ‘tricks’ here. Indeed, all of the tricks are used by our […]

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The earliest debris from last March’s Japanese tsunami has already made landfall in the Western United States, and the larger debris field is now expected to come ashore this year, according to new estimates by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

An earlier model had suggested that the bulk of the debris, which is now dispersed north of the Hawaiian islands, would wash up on the West Coast next year. But now government agencies and local volunteer groups are moving their preparations forward.

The event will likely be spread over most of the next year, with items easily blown by ocean winds arriving first, NOAA says. As the center of the densest patches moves in, the amount of debris should increase substantially. The denser patches of debris are unlikely to be a mass, but rather a more coherent collection over fewer square miles.

The question of who will be responsible for cleaning beaches in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and northern California remains. Various federal, state, and local groups appear to be planning something, though not necessarily the same thing or at the same time. Although they are working together, there is no single plan being created, nor is there one agency with whom […]

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Can a psychiatric disorder be diagnosed with a blood test? That may be the future if two recent studies pan out. Researchers are figuring out how to differentiate the blood of a depressed person from that of someone without depression.

In the latest study, published today (April 17) in the journal Translational Psychiatry, researchers identified 11 new markers, or chemicals in the blood, for early-onset depression. These markers were found in different levels in teens with depression compared with their levels in teens who didn’t have the condition.

Currently, depression is diagnosed by a subjective test, dependent upon a person’s own explanation of their symptoms, and a psychiatrist’s interpretation of them. These blood tests aren’t meant to replace a psychiatrist, but could make the diagnosis process easier.

If a worried parent could have a family physician run a blood test, it might ease the diagnosis process during the already tough time of adolescence, said Eva Redei, a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who was involved in the study of the teen-depression blood test.

If they hold up to further testing, blood tests could help young adults, who often go untreated because they aren’t aware of their disease, get treated. The biological basis […]

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Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.

Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.

In addition, the Justice Department reviewed only a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite warnings that problems were far more widespread and could affect potentially thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts.

As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects.

In one Texas case, Benjamin Herbert Boyle was executed in 1997, more than a year after the Justice Department began its review. Boyle would not have been eligible […]

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