New Australian research has revealed how stress can turn the body’s lymphatic system into a super highway for breast cancer cells, allowing the cancer to spread more rapidly.
Key points
- Study shows cancer spread faster in stressed mice
- Medication prevented the effect of stress on cancer in mice
- A study on stress in human cancer patients is underway
- And now scientists also know how to prevent it from happening — at least in mice.
The medical community has long debated how stress affects a patient’s prognosis, and while stress has not been proven to cause cancer, scientists now say it might have a significant role in how it spreads.
A Monash University research team led by cancer biologist Dr Erica Sloan studied how stress drives metastasis — the spread of an existing cancer from the original tumour — in mice with breast cancer.
“Stress sends a signal into the cancer that allows tumour cells to escape from the cancer and spread through the body,” Dr Sloan said.
“The stress is sort of acting like a fertiliser and helping the tumour cell take hold and colonise those other organs.”
Dr Sloan said although it was already known cancer could spread through the lymphatic system, her team discovered stress transformed the network into a super highway that allowed the cancer cells to travel at much faster speeds.
The group placed mice with cancer in confined spaces in order to mimic the physiological and emotional effects of stressed humans.
Dr Caroline Le, who was part of Dr Sloan’s team, said the effect the stress had on their cancer was marked.
“You see six times more spread of cancer in stressed mice compared to control mice,” she said.
Medication can stop effect of stress in mice
Stress levels typically increase in a patient after a cancer diagnosis.
The good news is Dr Sloan’s research team found an age-old class of medication — currently used for high blood pressure and cardiac arrhythmia — could prevent the stress facilitating the cancer’s spread.
The medication contains beta blockers which prevent the stress response by competing with adrenalin to limit heart rate and blood pressure increase.
Top Comments
Again, medical research focusing on the development of new medications. If every research dollar was spent on researching the role of nutrition in our major diseases, new medications wouldn't be needed.
How is nutrition related to brain cancer and in particular Gliblastomas?
Nutrition, while not the be all and end all (ie: those who eat healthily can still get sick), feeds every single part of our body... Of course it has a role in our health!
Perhaps you should take a trip to a nutritionist to have a chat about the benefits of a healthy & balanced diet
No. I don't need to go to a nutritionist.
I eat very well am perfectly healthy,as was my 17 year old daughter who died from a Glioblastoma.
Perhaps you could research and find that there is no correlation between diet and brain cancer.
Thank you.
I'm very sorry for your loss Guest. I watched my father be poisoned by chemo which made him even sicker before he died awfully. The thought of losing one of my young daughters is horrendous. I feel so much for you. I spent many, many hours researching the approach to cancer when Dad was sick, desperate to find other options. I quickly found that millions gets wasted on new treatments and drugs, rather than researching causative and preventive factors. The role of nutrition has been terribly under-researched, it isn't of interest to pharma companies. I am sure the answers lie in getting the balance right in our 24 essential nutrients. It irritates me to see that doctors are now exploring immunotherapy, which many organisations like the Gawler Foundation and nutritionists and holistic doctors all over the world have been getting results with for decades. Typical however, that medical doctors are using pharmaceuticals to trigger an immune response when our bodies are geared to do the same thing with high nutrition.