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Antioxidants, once touted as a cancer preventive, may actually spur the disease's spread. Now scientists have figured out how.
Whether taken as a dietary supplement or produced by the body, antioxidants appear to help lung cancer cells invade tissues beyond the chest cavity, two studies report online June 27 in Cell. Experiments in mice and human tissue revealed that antioxidants both safeguard tumors against cell-damaging molecules and prompt the accumulation of the protein Bach1. As Bach1 piles up, tumors burn through glucose at higher rates, thus fueling the cancer cells' migration to new organs (SN: 1/9/16, p. 13).
"The results provide a new mechanism for how lung cancer cells can spread and may lead to new possibilities for treatment," says Martin Bergö, a molecular biologist at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm who led one of the new studies.
[...] Bergö and his colleagues had previously found that supplement doses of antioxidants accelerate primary tumor growth in mice, and clinical trials have unearthed similar results in humans. Now knowing how antioxidants exacerbate cancer, scientists may be able to undermine the mechanism with drugs that inhibit Ho1, block Bach1 production or prevent glycolysis, the glucose-guzzling process that fuels tumors. Ho1 inhibitors are already U.S. Food and Drug Administration–approved to treat inherited disorders called porphyrias, and could potentially be repurposed to fight cancer.
"Understanding why some cancers metastasize and some don't is one of the biggest problems in lung cancer right now," says Roy Herbst, a medical oncologist at Yale Cancer Center.
Recognizing this newfound pathway as a "potent promoter of metastasis" could help doctors develop new treatments, identify which tumors to treat aggressively and better advise patients about taking vitamin supplements, Herbst says. "This pathway could be explored in other tumor types — this will definitely have some impact on the field."
Source: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/antioxidants-lung-cancer-spread-prevent
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Hyperturtle on Sunday July 07 2019, @02:54PM (1 child)
This has to have been known for at least 15 or more years. I remember discussing news about recent scientific discoveries about smoking and vitamin C levels in the lungs--I recall having this discussion on September 11th 2001, in fact, and the conversation was disrupted due to a developing news story...
Anyway, smokers were found to have greater levels of vitamin C and related vitamin compounds in their lungs--if the smokers had a diet suitable enough to provide it, of course.
It was expected that eating citrus fruit would be of a greater benefit in smokers, as the lungs appeared to be making use of the Vitamin C family of chemicals to bolster defenses. Autopsies of smokers that died of events unrelated to smoking had curiously revealed lungs that were enriched in Vitamin C and anti-oxidents related to ascorbic acid. A simple Vitamin C supplement wouldn't be enough to cover what the lungs apparently were loading themselves up with.
It wasn't known at the time (antioxident research was not quite 'mainstream' yet) that taking antioxidents when undergoing chemotherapy essentially helps the body indiscriminately, and thus the cancer and tumors, to deal with the radiation and chemical damage caused by the therpay and try to heal. Chemotherapy is supposed to kill the cancer and it also badly effects surrounding cells--it makes people feel a lot sicker than they did prior to treatment. Anything you take to make yourself feel better that does more than mask symptoms will likely, in some way, benefit the cancer's self-healing and cell division process due to cancer cells being able to make use of anti-oxidents to defend against radiation in much the same way regular body cells do. There are exceptions outside the scope of a reply, but vitamin supplements are not among those exceptions.
What was happening in the lungs was the body was indeed trying to help fight off damage caused by smoking; sometimes to even fight cancer that had not been diagnosed yet--but once radiation and chemotherpay was introduced, the body's natural actions helps cancer flourish, which is why such drastic efforts to poison the patient and use essentially space age weaponry to burn holes in people is done. Otherwise, an aggressive cancer often hijacks the system and wins if things are allowed to proceed 'naturally'.
Antioxidents can of course be used to help mitigate many health issues, including cancer, prior to anything terminal taking root... but there are situations in which the enemy can shoot you with the same silver bullets or defend itself with the same magical shields. You can't make up for a lifetime of bad eating habits, either.
I think the real problem is that there are unscrupulous people that are able to profit far too much off of ignorant people's fears of illness and age, and hopes to remain healthy and youthful. Any superfood/superfruit and so on gives you an idea of how entrenched it is that even with food, there is a magical pill that someone can take to prevent or cure everything. Notice how a lot of those superthings change over time; people start to realize the inflated cost isn't making them any younger... then the search is on for a new substance to market, or perhaps re-invent an old one by finding a study that shows something new or different.
Once some science is done by a reputable organization or group that determines a benefit, no matter how small, someone, somewhere, can be relied upon to set up podium and hire a carnival barker to start selling a snake oil version of it to people that want to believe or vaguely heard about it in the news so it must be true.
For as much of an information age that we have, I think there's a lot of ignorance. And really I can't blame anyone for not having the time to look up things--but the system is often stacked against them. Google will page rank a place with great advertising/marketing stuff for snake oil instead of the actual scientific journals or medical journals--that quite often are paywalled anyway!
It's literally cheaper in the short run to be educated by the positive benefits of a product with made up claims, on a store that sell the stuff... because of how website promotion is gamed so heavily by Google via search engine optimizations... than it is to get real information, especially since some of those scientific journals with actual, real, information... throw a sueball at anyone trying to share research work completed with tax dollars that are locked behind a subscription. So what happens is that the marketing lies end up free and promoted and reinforced due to the profit involved, and the real info is kept locked behind a paywall. Google is more than happy to promote products and sites that sell products in their results, because their business model doesnt have anything to do with keeping people informed.
Not all supplements are bad, of course--but the more hyped it is, they're trying to inform the world via marketing for a reason. Otherwise it'd be a breakthrough or at least a story reported on reputable news organizations...
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Sunday July 07 2019, @03:14PM
+1 Understatement award, given as "+1 Insightful", because there is no "+1 Understated." 😊
--
The actor who played captain Kirk on TOS has
shut down his new line of ladies lingerie.
Apparently "Shatner Panties" wasn't the
best choice for a name.