cancer lesson #1

I’m reading Anti-cancer: A new way of life by David Servan-Schreiber, M.D., Ph.D. and I want to share it with everyone. The author was diagnosed with a pretty serious brain tumour at the age of 31. He is awesome because he is able to explain the science behind processes of cancer and to share research that is less widely known than a lot of stuff we’ve all heard. He did not like being told “there is nothing you can do” with regards to lifestyle factors that could prevent or help heal cancer. Here is an unauthorized excerpt:

Rudolf Virchow, MD, was a great German physician and founder of modern pathology – the science that studies the relationship between disease and the processes that affect tissues. In 1863 he observed that several patients seemed to have developed cancer at the exact spot where they had received a blow or where a shoe or a tool had rubbed repeatedly. Under the microscope, he noticed the presence of a number of white cells in the cancerous growths. He advanced the hypothesis that cancer was a wound-repairing attempt that had gone wrong. His description seemed too anecdotal, almost too poetic, and was never really taken seriously. Some 130 years later, Harold Dvorak, MD, professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, returned to this hypothesis. In “Tumors: Wounds That Do Not Heal,” he presented forceful arguments in support of Virchow’s original theory. In the article, he demonstrated the surprising similarity between mechanisms sparked by naturally occurring inflammation and the manufacture of cancerous growths.

Dvorak also noted that more than one cancer in six is directly linked to a chronic inflammatory state. This is true for cervical cancer, which most commonly follows a chronic infection of papillomavirus. It is true too for colon cancer, which is very often found in subjects suffering from a chronic inflammatory disease of the intestine. Cancer of the stomach is linked to infection the bacterium Helicobacter pylori (also a cause of ulcers). Cancer of the liver is related to infection by hepatitis B or C; mesothelioma to inflammation caused by asbestos; lung cancer to bronchial inflammation caused by the many toxic additives in cigarette smoke.

Nearly twenty years after Harold Dvorak’s pioneering article, the National Cancer Institute brought out a report highlighting inflammation research too often ignored by oncologists*. The report describes in great detail the processes by which cancer cells manage to lead the body’s healing mechanisms astray. Just like immune cells gearing up to repair lesions, cancer cells need to produce inflammation to sustain their growth. To this end, they begin an abundant production of the same highly inflammatory substances – cytokines, prostaglandins, and leukotrienes – seen in the natural reparation of wounds. They act as chemical fertilizers promoting cell reproduction – in this case, cancer cell reproduction. Growing tumors use these substances to help themselves develop and to make the barriers surround them more permeable. The very process that enables the immune system to repair lesions and pursue enemies in all the body’s recesses is diverted for the benefit of cancer cells. They exploit it to spread and reproduce. Thanks to the inflammation they create, they infiltrate neighboring tissues, slip into the bloodstream, migrate, and establish remote colonies called metastases.

*my emphasis

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