(Press-News.org) How much does diet affect the cancer patient? Do "antioxidants" really play an important role in health - or are they causing more cancers than they cure? And what exactly is the relationship between obesity and cancer?
The latest Special Issue in ecancermedicalscience collects four original articles from experts in cancer and metabolism, addressing the hottest areas of research in this rapidly developing field.
"In our clinical practice, cancer patients often ask 'Doctor, is there something specific I should eat or avoid eating?'" says Guest Editor of this Special Issue, Dr Luca Mazzarella of the European Institute of Oncology, Milan, Italy.
"This ecancer special issue tries to equip the practicing oncologist with an up-to-date and critical collection of evidence to provide the best answer to this question."
The relationship between cancer and metabolism was overlooked for decades - metabolism has long been typecast as an uninteresting research subject.
But the past five years have seen an incredible surge of interest. Now, it seems that every cancer-related article in the popular press claims a new connection between food and cancer - whether positive or negative, or sometimes both.
Take the relationship between cancer and obesity, for example. As Mazzarella explains, the molecular mechanisms underlying the links between cancer and obesity have not been properly studied and are poorly understood, leading to mixed messages.
"As the scientific community is insecure on what messages it should deliver, administrators are uncertain as to what exactly to recommend, and consumers are confused about whom to believe," he explains.
"This leaves the field flooded with pseudo-scientific recommendations that are hard to eradicate."
Antioxidants are another area where the juggernaut of popular belief has outpaced the scientific understanding of their role in cancer. Dr Marco Giorgio of the European Institute of Oncology prepared an expert review on the "unfulfilled promise" of antioxidants in cancer.
"In 2013, researcher Jim Watson wrote in Open Biology that antioxidant supplementation 'may have caused more cancers than they have prevented,'" Giorgio writes. Clearly, there is a disconnect between research frontiers and dietary marketing - Giorgio explains the role of oxidative stress in cancer metabolism to clarify the issue.
"Many beliefs about food and breast cancer persist in the absence of supporting scientific evidence," writes Dr Krizia Ferrini of the European Institute of Oncology, author of an article connecting the dots between lifestyle, nutrition and breast cancer.
"Despite current awareness on the role of nutrition on cancer outcomes, there is inadequate translation from research findings into clinical practice."
The fourth article in the Special Issue addresses the important topic of biomarkers. Researchers led by Dr Cecilia Bosco of King's College London, UK examined the data produced by the Swedish Apolipoprotein MOrtality RISk study (AMORIS) to look for metabolic serum biomarkers, which may be used for the prediction of cancer.
This collection of articles spans the breadth of current understanding in cancer metabolism. It is our hope that healthcare professionals will be able to use the information in this Special Issue to inform their own best practice - if not their own diets.
INFORMATION:
Special Issue: Cancer and Metabolism
Guest Editor: Luca Mazzarella
http://ecancer.org/special-issues/9-cancer-and-metabolism.php
ecancermedicalscience is the journal of the European Institute of Oncology.
Mazzarella Luca (2015) Why does obesity promote cancer? Epidemiology, biology, and open questions ecancer 9 554
Bosco Cecilia, Wulaningsih Wahyu, Melvin Jennifer, Santaolalla Aida, De Piano Maria, Arthur Rhonda and Van Hemelrijck Mieke (2015) Metabolic serum biomarkers for the prediction of cancer: a follow-up of the studies conducted in the Swedish AMORIS study ecancer 9 555
Giorgio Marco (2015) Oxidative stress and the unfulfilled promises of antioxidant agents ecancer 9 556
Ferrini Krizia, Ghelfi Francesca, Mannucci Roberta and Titta Lucilla (2015) Lifestyle, nutrition and breast cancer: facts and presumptions for consideration ecancer 9 557
The brain's effect on other parts of the body has been well established. Now, a group that includes two University of Florida Health researchers has found that it's a two-way street: Body fat can send a signal that affects the way the brain deals with stress and metabolism.
While the exact nature of those signals remains a mystery, researchers say simply knowing such a pathway exists and learning more about it could help break a vicious cycle: Stress causes a desire to eat more, which can lead to obesity. And too much extra fat can impair the body's ability to send a ...
Many of the same genes may affect GCSE results across a broad range of subjects according to a new study from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London.
The research, published today in Scientific Reports, also suggests that educational achievement at GCSE is highly heritable, with over half of the difference between results potentially due to inherited differences in DNA.
Previous studies have shown that academic achievement in the core subjects of English, mathematics and science at GCSE may be influenced by the same genetic traits. ...
Philadelphia, PA, July 23, 2015 - Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) can have devastating consequences. Both are associated with high rates of disability and suicide, and although they are separate conditions, they commonly co-occur. For example, a soldier who has developed PTSD as a result of a traumatic experience may have also sustained a brain injury during that experience.
Significant research has been conducted to understand the brain mechanisms underlying PTSD and TBI, but there has still been a lack of knowledge regarding exactly ...
New research by health scientists at the University of York has revealed that a greater proportion of men than women suffer from cannabis psychosis.
There has been much research exploring the nature of the relationship between cannabis -- the most widely used illicit drug in the United Kingdom -- and psychosis, however the role of gender in relation to cannabis psychosis is less well explored and understood.
A new study by researchers in the Department of Health Sciences at York used large datasets over a period of 11 years to investigate the differences in men and ...
A new drug that blocks cancer's escape route from chemotherapy could be used to treat deadly lung and pancreatic cancers, new research reports.
Scientists have shown in human cancer cells and in mice that the drug - discovered at The Institute of Cancer Research, London - boosts the effectiveness of conventional chemotherapy.
The drug, known as CCT245737, is scheduled to begin first-in-human clinical trials in patients with lung and pancreatic cancers - two cancers with low survival rates that continue to resist currently available treatments.
The new study is published ...
A team of researchers from the University of Leicester and France's G2ELab-CNRS in Grenoble have for the first time observed the growth of free nanoparticles in helium gas in a process similar to the decaffeination of coffee, providing new insights into the structure of nanoparticles.
Nanoparticles have a very large surface area compared with their volume and are often able to react very quickly. This makes them useful as catalysts in chemical reactions and they are often used in sports equipment, clothing and sunscreens.
In a paper published by the Journal of Physical ...
Contact between children and fathers following parental separation facilitates the continued abuse of women and children, according to new research focusing on the experiences of families with a prior history of domestic abuse conducted by social work experts at Trinity College Dublin.
The research, which explored the experiences of post-separation fathering in families with prior history of domestic abuse perpetrated by the father against the mother, involved the completion of survey questionnaires 219 mothers regarding their 449 children as well as face-to-face interviews ...
TAMPA, Fla. - Recent advances in the understanding of cancer have led to more personalized therapies, such as drugs that target particular proteins and tests that analyze gene expression patterns in tumors to predict a patient's response to therapy. Moffitt Cancer Center researchers have contributed to these advances by developing the first test that analyzes the sensitivity of tumors to radiation therapy. They discovered that colon cancer metastases have varying sensitivity to radiation therapy based on their anatomic location.
Researchers from Moffitt previously developed ...
An algorithm dubbed ENVE could be the Google for genetic aberrations -- and it comes from Case Western Reserve.
Remember the World Wide Web before the famed search engine? The web offered extraordinary amounts of information, but no consistently reliable way to secure relevant results.
Cancer researchers at Case Western Reserve encountered a comparable conundrum when considering reams of data about the body that new technological advances provide -- how could they tell what parts of the information actually offer value. In this instance, the goal was to distinguish ...
This news release is available in German.
Organic molecules allow producing printable electronics and solar cells with extraordinary properties. In spintronics, too, molecules open up the unexpected possibility of controlling the magnetism of materials and, thus, the spin of the flowing electrons. According to what is reported in Nature Materials by a German-French team of researchers, a thin layer of organic molecules can stabilize the magnetic orientation of a cobalt surface. (DOI: 10.1038/NMAT4361)
"This special interaction between organic molecules and metal ...
