4 replies to this topic

[Mixter]

Lactic acid strongly increases cancer risk (as well as the hypoxia that produces it), which is why muscle tissue evolved a high resistance to cancer. Hence, it should have a solid mechanism / system of mechanisms for this resistance.

Some cancers like colon are preventable, but cancer is still the leading non-preventable cause of death in the future. I consider WILT viable, but far far away. In between I see no substantial, groundbreaking and generic anti-cancer approaches.

Understanding and mimicking the evolved muscle tissue gene expression and cancer prevention mechanisms might be a powerful method of beating >95% of cancers as leading cause of death. (Ref: see bottom).


I only know of two sources, and would greatly appreciate if you can help me find more. If we can gather more material on this, perhaps I could help turning this into a SENS/MFoundation literature review.


1. http://www.ncbi.nlm..../pubmed/7393016

Med Hypotheses. 1980 Feb;6(2):133-7.Click here to read Links
Possible reasons for the high resistance of muscle to cancer.
Seely S.

Muscle, particularly striated muscle, is highly resistant both to primary and to metastatic cancer. This resistivity is thought to be connected with the lactic acid producing activities of tumors. Lactic acid is an anoxia signal in the body, to which blood vessels tend to respond with a sprouting reaction, new vessels seeking out the source of anoxia and vascularising it. The reaction of the body to incipient cancer is probably two-fold. Fibroblasts treat them as foreign bodies and attempt to encapsulate them, while blood vessels tend to perpetuate them by supplying them with nutrients. The fate of the tumor may be decided by the relative speed of the two reactions. Muscles are lactic acid producers themselves, hence their blood vessels must be conditioned to a greater tolerance of it than in other tissues. This may be the crucial factor in preventing incipient tumors from establishing themselves in muscle.

PMID: 7393016 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

2. A young researcher named Eva Vertes has picked up this topic. Mentioned in her TED talk at 06:00 or so: http://www.ted.com/i...f_medicine.html


Reference: there are two basic types of muscle cancer (Ref: wikipedia article: Soft_tissue_cancer), which are both very, very rare (<1% of all cancers):
Leiomyosarcoma occurs in 5-10% of soft tissue sarcomas, which are in themselves rare cancers. Ref: http://sarcomahelp.o...myosarcoma.html
Rhabdomyosarcoma accounts for 4% of all sarcomas (again, which are rare themselves), and most of it are childhood cancers. Ref: http://lib.bioinfo.pl/meid:69867

Edited by mixter, 14 May 2009 - 08:50 AM.

[AgeVivo]

Sorry to be ignorant, i guess i'm not the only one so i ask these questions:

Lactic acid strongly increases cancer risk (as well as the hypoxia that produces it)

While the paper you mention says or suggests it, isn't lactic acid commonly believed to inhibit cell division?

muscle tissue evolved a high resistance to cancer

isn't it due to postmitoticity? how does it compare with other postmitotic cells?

In between I see no substantial, groundbreaking and generic anti-cancer approaches.

what do you personally think of the here-famous approach of transferring cancer-resistant granulocytes?

Thx

Edited by AgeVivo, 14 May 2009 - 12:46 PM.

[Mixter]

While the paper you mention says or suggests it, isn't lactic acid commonly believed to inhibit cell division?

It's recently been uncovered that cancer fueling instead of inhibiting division is the case: http://www.scienceda...81120171325.htm
Lactic acid signals hypoxia and would turn on gene regulation promoting angiogenesis. I believe angiogenesis is not the only significant factor in muslce cancer-resistance (otherwise it wouldn't be that big news), because muscles is the tissue that already has the best vascular supply, so I believe stopping new blood vessel formation wouldn't make the big impact in resistance:

isn't it due to postmitoticity? how does it compare with other postmitotic cells?

Muscles at least do regularly have stem cells, like other postmitotic organs and tissues: http://www.medicalne...icles/30179.php
I don't know about stem cell density in comparison to other tissues, however what speaks against the above argument is: Stem cells actively seek out and repair injured muscle: http://www.genomenew...03/muscle.shtml

what do you personally think of the here-famous approach of transferring cancer-resistant granulocytes?

It is pretty cool, seems I entirely overlooked that.

Muscle tissue may still be interesting though, since it's solid tissue, and I'd think that immune cells differ more from tissue cells. Comparing the typicalgene expression of normal tissues vs. muscle tissue vs. granulocytes, and vs. cancerous tissues, for differences could be a pretty interesting approach...

Edited by mixter, 14 May 2009 - 03:42 PM.

[kismet]

muscle tissue evolved a high resistance to cancer

isn't it due to postmitoticity? how does it compare with other postmitotic cells?

That was also my first thought. Let's take the brain for example, it's almost entirely post-mitotic: so how does it compare? Brain cancer is pretty rare, while it's incidence is clearly increased in children (growth of the brain?). There are also neuronal stem cells present (I think they're contained to the hippocampus and/or bulbus olfactorius, though). The turn-over of muscle cells may be higher than the turn-over of brain cells, but I think it's still very low compared to tissues showing a high prevalence of cancer (e.g. colorectal). If anyone can find meaningful, statistical differences in cancer incidence between post-mitotic tissues with and w/o lactate it might convince me somewhat (what if you compare smooth & striated muscle, AFAIK the former doesn't produce lactate so it may be "unconditioned" towards lactate)

[James Duke PhD]

You can also ask those questions direclty from Eva Vertes (she will have Ask Me More session on 14th of Sept) - https://www.guaana.c...b9tqSmTJzeZHnw2

 

Edited by James Duke PhD, 07 September 2016 - 10:45 AM.