Nuclear Oncology

Posts Tagged ‘Breast cancer’

In 2005, the results of several investigations agreed that some colon tumors were directly related to the consumption of red meat, and today these data have not changed.

The EPIC study, which involved five Spanish centers, became the latest in a long line of evidence in the excess of red meat has been associated with an increased risk of colorectal cancer. The same study served to demonstrate that at present there is no evidence that consumption of chicken has something to do with this disease.

Abuse of red meat in the diet was associated with other cancers, breast cancer in 2006, these were tumors that grow especially influenced by the action of hormones. Specifically, women who drank more than a serving or serving half of these products a day (burgers, pork, sausage, bacon, hot dogs, etc …) had twice as much risk of developing hormone-dependent breast tumor that who limit their meat intake to three or fewer servings a week. Confirmed evidence for a new job at the University of Leeds, UK, published in the British Journal of Cancer ‘, 2007.

It seems that the culprits of this association are two substances found in meat, hemoglobin and myoglobin, which can trigger the formation of carcinogens in the gut while saturated fats and the presence of hormones in animal meat are other factors that have signed the development of these types of tumors.

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (both in the U.S.) have developed a study involving the precious metal in the fight against cancer.

In research conducted at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston (USA) and has been published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the authors show that gold nanoparticles injected into breast tumors cells make cancer more sensitive to radiation treatment.

Previous research has shown that high temperatures can damage and kill cancer cells and make them more sensitive to radiation cancer stem cells with minimal side effects to healthy tissues. However, in past years has been largely abandoned hyperthermia due to the difficulty of developing tools to heat tumors rapidly, local and less toxicity.

The team, led by Rachel Atkinson, a specialist in Translational Biology and Molecular Medicine, gold nanoparticles designed to turn the heat on stem cells and make them more sensitive to radiation therapy. The researchers showed that hyperthermia inhibits cancer stem cells in mice with breast tumors similar to human or grafts taken directly from patients.

The rodents received an injection of nanoshells (tiny particles of silica coated with a thin layer of gold) in the tumor. These are distributed evenly through your blood vessels and are filtered through small pores to stay with malignant cells, where local heat produced when activated by a laser.

The temperature rise caused the stem cells are not repaired the DNA damage produced by radiation and increased its sensitivity to therapy. Thus, the researchers found that mice that received hyperthermia with radiation had a lower rate of cancer cells are proliferating and formed fewer tumors, suggesting that hyperthermia blocked the growth of cancer stem cells and could have changed aggressive properties.

On the other hand, mice that had received only radiation had cancer cells multiply faster and were more aggressive tumors than mice that received no treatment.