cancer protects against Alzheimer’s (in general, diseases of the brain and central nervous system), and vice versa. This curious paradox, which for years has baffled oncologists, psychiatrists and neurologists, and has an explanation, and is in the genes. Scientists at the National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) directed by Alfonso Valencia have been submerged with tools in the DNA of 1,700 patients and identified hundreds of genes responsible for this association, which represents the strongest molecular evidence for the exclusive relationship between tumors and neurodegenerative diseases and cross protective effect.
Various studies had observed a lower incidence of cancer among patients with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or schizophrenia. In patients with Alzheimer’s disease, for example, the risk of a tumor is a 42% lower. Among people with schizophrenia, the relationship was even more striking, as highlighted Tabarés Rafael, professor of psychiatry at the University of Valencia and co-signer of the study. “Some of these people are heavy smokers and comparatively have fewer lung tumors than would be expected by this habit,” which further puzzled researchers.
Anteriormene were raised different scenarios to describe the inverse relationship between these seemingly disparate diseases, but there was no study using laboratory tests had come to build a solid enough story. Until the paper published Thursday by the journal PLOS Genetics .
To achieve this, researchers at the CNIO crossed by bioinformatics tools for gene expression data of nearly 1,700 people from 30 studies of diseases of the central nervous system (CNS): Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and schizophrenia, and work on Three types of cancer (colon, lung and prostate). As a result of this operation they found hundreds of genes involved in the two diseases, although differently.
Researchers dived 1,700 patients data
were 74 genes whose behavior was suppressed in people with diseases of the CNS but overexpressed (overworking) in people with any of the three tumors analyzed. In other 19 genes opposite was the case: had a higher activity in diseases such as Alzheimer’s and a reduced expression with cancer
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“Up to 90% of the biological processes that appear enhanced (accelerated by increased expression of genes) in the case of cancer are repressed in diseases of the nervous system analyzed” stand CNIO researchers Cesar Boulton and Kristina Ibanez. This suggests that the same cellular mechanisms that trigger cancer could be protecting suffering Alzheimer’s, and vice versa.
Among the list of genes identified is the PIN1, related to the process of protein folding and that small-scale reproduces the finding of researchers at the CNIO. If you are overactive accelerates cell metabolism, which is associated with tumor development. But, simultaneously, protect Alzheimer’s because it prevents the normal functioning of the TAU protein, and this has a key role in neurodegeneration and in particular, its accumulation is associated with this disease that damages neurons.
However, the mechanism described by the researchers is not always linear, and has much more to do with more complex and action of genes biological processes.
work brings to the table another increasingly present among researchers question: raises a common root between a theory pathologies as diverse as neoplastic and neurodegenerative processes
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There are medications that are effective in both types of diseases
This question and other researchers have addressed that speak of neurodegenerative diseases and cancer as two sides of the same coin: the alteration of basic along cellular mechanisms of aging. Ie argue that senescence is itself a disease, beyond its manifestations can be oncological or neurodegenerative diseases such as holding Massimo Musico, an Italian researcher who warned from the observation of 200,000 cases-that Alzheimer’s protects cancer.
This relationship is based on the controls which fail in the regulation of proliferation and cell death. Thus, there may be an imbalance in a sense-development uncontrolled tissue in the case of cancer, or in the other, problems with programmed cell death and wound repair in the case of diseases Neurodegenerative.
expression of these mismatches is manifested by the described genetic behavior. But its origin is more difficult to determine. In the case of schizophrenia, for example, it is unknown whether the protection against cancer are due to self-triggering mechanism if the disease or chronic medication-character, is consumed during years to combat administered which has this antitumor function, as noted by Alfonso Valencia. “In any case, the final mechanism would be described, either because the disease itself can repress the expression of a gene or if it was due to the consumption of a drug.”
In fact, as noted Rafael Tabarés has been observed that some drugs, such as, for example, Family antipsychotic phenothiazines, used to treat schizophrenia, have anticancer effects. Hence researchers pose that genetic association described in the work between tumors and diseases of the nervous system could be harnessed for the benefit of both types of patients. “It could open the door to the use of anticancer drugs to treat some diseases of the nervous system and conversely” pose CNIO researchers.
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