Weight management and its role in breast cancer rehabilitation

Overweight and obesity are risk factors for post-menopausal breast cancer, and many women diagnosed with breast cancer, irrespective of menopausal status, gain weight after diagnosis. Weight management plays an important role in rehabilitation and recovery since obesity and/or weight gain may lead to poorer breast cancer prognosis, as well as prevalent co-morbid conditions (e.g. cardiovascular disease and diabetes), poorer surgical outcomes (e.g., increased operating and recovery times, higher infection rates, and poorer healing), lymphedema, fatigue, functional decline, and poorer health and overall quality of life. Health care professionals should encourage weight management at all phases of the cancer care continuum as a means to potentially avoid adverse sequelae and late effects, as well as to improve overall health and possibly survival. Comprehensive approaches that involve dietary and behavior modification, and increased aerobic and strength training exercise have shown promise in either preventing weight gain or promoting weight loss, reducing biomarkers associated with inflammation and co-morbidity, and improving lifestyle behaviors, functional status, and quality of life in this high-risk patient population

Novel QCD Phenomenology

I review a number of topics where conventional wisdom in hadron physics has been challenged. For example, hadrons can be produced at large transverse momentum directly within a hard higher-twist QCD subprocess, rather than from jet fragmentation. Such "direct" processes can explain the deviations from perturbative QCD predictions in measurements of inclusive hadron cross sections at fixed x_T= 2p_T/\sqrt s, as well as the "baryon anomaly", the anomalously large proton-to-pion ratio seen in high centrality heavy ion collisions. Initial-state and final-state interactions of the struck quark lead to Bjorken-scaling single-spin asymmetries, diffractive deep inelastic scattering, the breakdown of the Lam-Tung relation in Drell-Yan reactions, as well as nuclear shadowing and antishadowing. The Gribov-Glauber theory predicts that antishadowing of nuclear structure functions is not universal, but instead depends on the flavor quantum numbers of each quark and antiquark, thus explaining the anomalous nuclear dependence measured in deep-inelastic neutrino scattering. One cannot attribute such phenomena to the structure of the hadron or nucleus itself. It is thus important to distinguish "static" structure functions computed from the square of the target light-front wavefunctions, versus "dynamical" structure functions which include the effects of the final-state rescattering of the struck quark. The importance of the J=0 photon-quark QCD contact interaction in deeply virtual Compton scattering is emphasized. The scheme-independent BLM method for setting the renormalization scale is discussed. Eliminating the renormalization scale ambiguity greatly improves the precision of QCD predictions and increases the sensitivity of searches for new physics at the LHC. Other novel features of QCD are discussed, including the consequences of confinement for quark and gluon condensates.Comment: Invited talk, presented at the Gribov-80 Memorial Workshop on Quantum Chromodynamics and Beyond, May, 2010, Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. Trieste, Ital