Could you Sponsor a football team?

Balls to cancer currently has three football teams a mens team, under 18s boys team and a ladies team. All three of them are looking for sponsors for the new season.

We have many sponsorship options available starting from £150 upto the main shirt sponsor at £950.

The main sponsor will get in return a free shirt, a write up here on our website with links to their business, weekly mentions on our social media.

The smaller sponsors will get a mention on our team write up on our website and a monthly social media mention.

So if you can help any or all of our teams please contact us today

Help us to raise the funds needed to keep our holiday homes open

Since December 2022 we have been desperately trying to raise funds for our two beautiful holiday homes in Burnham on Sea. These holiday homes are a place where families or individuals with cancer can go for respite during treatment absolutely free. For some this is a break from Chemotherapy and the stresses, strains, pains and sickness that come with it. For some it is there first family holiday and others their last.

These holidays are a vital break for these families and we need your help to keep them open.

Sadly like every other part of our daily lives the costs have gone through the roof way beyond what we anticipated with fees, cleaning, repairs etc…. so we are in danger of having to close them.

We need to raise £20,000 and we’re a long way off so if you see this please, click the link and make a donation here

Thank you

Risk of cervical cancer found to be twice as high in women with mental illness

Women with mental illness, neuropsychiatric disability, or substance abuse are less likely to go for gynecological smear tests for cervical cancer and run more than twice the risk of developing the disease. The findings are presented in The Lancet Public Health by researchers from Karolinska Institutet, who stress the importance of proactively approaching these women as a preventative measure against cervical cancer.

In May 2020, the WHO approved a global strategy for eliminating cervical cancer as a women’s health problem. Part of the strategy is a requirement that 70 percent of women are screened for the disease at least once before age 35 and twice before age 45.According to the researchers, inequality of care is one of the major hurdles to this objective.”Our study identified a high-risk group that needs extra attention if we’re to succeed in eliminating cervical cancer,” says one of the study’s first authors Kejia Hu, postdoc researcher at the Institute of Environmental Medicine at Karolinska Institutet.The observational study included over four million women born between 1940 and 1995. From this population, the researchers calculated the risk of cervical cancer and precancerous cervical lesions as well as participation in screening programs for cervical cancer, comparing women diagnosed by a specialist with mental illness, neuropsychiatric disability, or substance abuse with women without such diagnoses.”Our results suggest that women with these diagnoses participate more seldom in screening programs at the same time as they have a higher incidence of lesions in the cervix,” says Dr. Hu. “We thus found that they have twice the risk of developing cervical cancer.”An elevated risk was observed for all diagnoses, but the greatest association was noted for substance abuse. Women with mental illness should be made more aware of the need to undergo regular gynecological screening, according to the researchers:”It would lower their risk of cancer,” says one of the paper’s authors Karin Sundström, senior researcher at the Department of Laboratory Medicine, Karolinska Institutet. “Similarly, if healthcare professionals are more aware of the cancer risk in these patients, they can step up preventative measures and consider how these could be delivered to potentially under-served patients.”The strength of the study lies in the sheer size of the cohort and the length of the time-span period over which the participants were studied. One limitation is that the researchers did not have full data about other risk factors for cervical cancer such as smoking, hormonal contraceptives, and sexually transmitted diseases.

Processed red meat intake linked to increased incidence of blood cancers

Processed red meat intake is associated with an increased incidence of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) in a Japanese population, according to a study published online March 7 in Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine.

Yoshimitsu Shimomura, M.D., from the Graduate School of Medicine at Osaka University in Japan, and colleagues examined the association between AML/MDS incidence and meat, fish, or fatty acid intake using data for 93,366 participants from the Japan Public Health Center-based prospective study. Participants were followed for 1,345,002 person-years.The researchers identified 67 AML and 49 MDS cases during the follow-up period. Increased intake of processed red meat was associated with an increased incidence of AML/MDS, with a hazard ratio of 1.63 for the highest versus the lowest tertile. No associations were seen for intake of other foods and fatty acids with AML/MDS.”Our results showed that a higher processed red meat intake was associated with an increased incidence of AML/MDS,” the authors write. “On the other hand, other intakes of interest had a null association with the incidence of AML/MDS.

All hormonal contraceptives increase breast cancer risk: 

All hormonal contraceptives carry a slightly increased risk of breast cancer, including the increasingly popular progestogen-only pills, according to a study published on Tuesday.

The researchers who carried out the study stressed that the increased risk of breast cancer needs to be weighed against the benefits of hormonal contraceptives, including the protection they provide against other forms of female cancer.Previous studies have established an increased risk of breast cancer from two-hormone, or combined, contraceptives that use both estrogen and progestogen.While the use of progestogen-only contraceptives has been on the rise for well over a decade, little research had been performed previously on their links to breast cancer.The study, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, found that the risk of a woman developing breast cancer was about the same for hormonal contraceptives using both estrogen and progestogen as for those using just progestogen.According to the study, women taking hormonal contraceptives have a 20 to 30 percent higher risk of developing breast cancer than those who do not use them.The findings are similar to those published previously, including in a vast 1996 study.The risk remains about the same regardless of the delivery method—oral pill, IUD, implant or injection—or whether it is a combined pill or progestogen alone.Taking into account that the likelihood of breast cancer increases with age, the authors of the study calculated how much absolute excess risk is associated with hormonal contraceptives.For women taking hormonal contraceptives for a period of five years between the ages of 16 to 20, it represented eight cases of breast cancer per 100,000, they said.Between 35 and 39 years old, it was 265 cases per 100,000.’Very small increase in absolute risk'”Nobody wants to hear that something that they’re taking is going to increase their risk of breast cancer by 25 percent,” said Gillian Reeves, a professor of statistical epidemiology at the University of Oxford and a co-author of the study.”What we’re talking about here is very small increase in absolute risk,” Reeves said.”These increases in risk for breast cancer have to, of course, be viewed in the context of what we know about the many benefits of taking hormonal contraceptives,” she added.”Not just in terms of birth control, but also because we know that oral contraceptives actually provide quite substantial and long term protection from other female cancers, such as ovarian cancer and endometrial cancer.”The study also confirmed, like others, that the risk of breast cancer declines in the years after a woman stops using hormonal contraceptives.Stephen Duffy, a professor at Queen Mary University of London who did not take part in the study, described the findings as “reassuring in that the effect is modest.”The study involved data from nearly 10,000 women under the age of 50 who developed breast cancer between 1996 and 2017 in the United Kingdom, where the use of progestogen-only contraceptives is now as widespread as the combined method.Reeves said there were several explanations for the growing use of progestogen-only contraceptives.They are recommended for women who are breast-feeding, who may be at risk of cardiovascular problems or smokers above the age of 35.”It might just be because women are taking hormonal contraceptives possibly into later years now,” Reeves said.”So they are naturally at higher risk of those other conditions for which risk is increased with combined contraceptives.”

Do you have space for our Clothes recycling unit?

Balls to cancer have teamed up with local clothes recycling company Green Global Recycling to help raise funds.

Over the last few years we have grown to know them very well and are very quick and efficient at collections.

One of the main problems we’ve heard about with collection units is “they are always full and over flowing and look a mess” well with Green Global Recycling this is not a problem, they regularly check them and if you see a problem they will rectify it normally same day.

So rest assured if you have one they will keep it tidy for you.

Get in touch with them today and tell them Balls to cancer sent you.

Lucky Buddha supports us

The guys at Lucky Buddha have kindly decided to help us raise money through the month of December.

so please check them out and get involved with their competitions

Heres a little about them…..

Lucky Buddha believes in a fairer way to play skill based competitions. Why wait for tickets to sell, competitions to close, live draws to take place when you can win in an INSTANT! Fair priced competitions matched with amazing prizes give our customers the opportunity to win items that others only dream of!

Covid and Cancer

We are constantly contacting by families that have lost loved ones to Cancer during and after the Covid pandemic.

We know that Covid was a major unknown concern but cancer services should never have stopped.

We know of many people that have been given terminal diagnosis directly because the were left without diagnosis, operations and treatment. Doctors are actually confirming that if they would have been treated in the covid years they may very well survived it.

Unfortunately we are still feeling the affects of Covid with doctors surgeries still not open properly, we know of many treatments and operations that have been cancelled or moved back.

Cancer is the most dangerous killer we face and we really need to get back to the urgency and quick response to patients

Heatable Join our team

We are really pleased to announce that Heatable has join our team and have become #Ballers.

They have decided to help us raise funds to help families with cancer.

For every new boiler fitted they will make a donation to us. So if you need or want a new better more efficient boiler that will save you money look no further.

Here’s a bit about them……

We’re a business. Family.Evidenced here by a remarkably cliche throwback photograph, co-founders Sam & Ben have been conspiring to revolutionise the property sector since leaving their Run-D.M.C audition with an all too familiar different perspective on the matter.

Like any good business startup memoir, our story starts with two brothers, nestled above the sales office of an estate agency in North West England. Having realised the many failings of an outdated boiler buying industry during a particularly mundane trip to the local deli, they set out to change things.

Heatable, assembled.Having realised that waistcoats were the key to success, Sam & Ben took on a new brother, Kristian, worked closely with their more successful Father and attended an event in which a man named Paul couldn’t be cropped out of the photo with any degree of accuracy.

After spending years in the world of property, we’d developed a robust dislike towards tradespeople. Well, not the people as such, but the time-consuming, laborious process to get a simple job, done – like replacing a boiler. Calling around, waiting around and getting messed around by pushy salespeople was not fun.So, we set out to fix it.

We launched the first version of Heatable. v1.A price comparison website where customers could get instant, fixed price quotes for their new boiler, from installers in their local area, without a salesman in sight. It was truly innovative, the first of it’s kind.