Posted by Joe Rongo on Tue, May 11, 2010 @ 08:16 AM
A new study suggests that stress can cause certain cancers to grow. Healthy cells in the human body typically need to maintain contact with other cells; if they float free, they die.
Not cancer cells: They have the ability to break loose and disperse, causing multiple tumors.
At the University of Texas in Houston, while studying ovarian cancer cells, reasearchers found that stress hormones such as adrenalin, activated a protein that helped the cancer cells survive and thrive while unattached. In mice, cancer cells grew more quickly when put under stress, then in more relaxed subjects. Researchers also found similar results with human patients that had ovarian cancer.
Those that had higher levels of stress hormones typically saw the disease progress faster. The next phase of the study is to determine if reducing stress, through drug therapy, massage therapy, or cognitive therapy has any effect on slowing down the cancer cell's growth.
"We're really trying to understand the biology," researcher Anil Stood told Scientific American. " We hope it will help us identify better therapeutic strategies".
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