(Press-News.org) Scientists at The Marine Mammal Center - the world's largest marine mammal hospital - have found that viral-caused cancer in adult California sea lions is significantly increased by their exposure to toxins in the environment. The study is the result of over 20 years of research and examination of nearly 400 California sea lion patients by The Marine Mammal Center.
The Marine Mammal Center has been on the forefront of researching and understanding cancer in California sea lions and its connection to both ocean and human health. Since the cancer in sea lions was first discovered in 1979, between 18-23 percent of adult sea lions admitted to the Center's hospital have died of the fatal disease - the highest prevalence for a single type of cancer in any mammal, including humans.
The study, which was published in Frontiers in Marine Science, a peer-reviewed research journal, concluded that efforts to prevent ecosystem contamination with pollutants must improve in order to prevent virally caused cancer development in both wildlife and humans.
"This paper's conclusions mark a significant milestone in piecing together the complicated puzzle of cancer development in California sea lions," said Dr. Pádraig Duignan, Chief Pathologist at The Marine Mammal Center and co-author of the study. "The decades of research looking into this deadly disease clearly shows the ocean environment we all share is in trouble and that we need to find solutions to protect our collective health."
The findings also show that California sea lions have among the highest levels of certain persistent organic pollutants in the blubber of any marine mammals - a disturbing report that is cause for concern for scientists across the globe.
"Even though some of the pollutants we're finding in the blubber have been out of use for years, these cancer-causing elements remain in the environment for a very long time and wreak havoc on opportunistic coastal feeders like sea lions," said Dr. Duignan. "It concerns me knowing that we consume very similar seafood as these cancer victims and that the ocean is raising a loud and clear alarm in the sick bodies of a sentinel species. We need to continue this critical research and collaborate with the human cancer doctors to find patterns to help discover the link between sea lions and ourselves."
Previously, researchers at The Marine Mammal Center determined that these sea lions are infected with a herpesvirus similar to one that causes Kaposi's sarcoma (a viral cancer) in humans. In this newly released study, scientists used complex statistical analysis and modeling to investigate the relative roles of the various factors in the development of fatal metastatic cancer. The results showed that the damage of the DNA in sea lions occurs due to a number of factors, including:
* the interaction of many environmental factors, including chemical contaminants and pollutants; and
* infections by tumor-promoting viruses like Otarine herpesvirus-1.
Additionally, their findings found that the animals' own genetic predisposition was not a significant factor to developing the cancer.
"While there is more to be learned about the complex factors that play into the development of this disease, what we learn from these animals contributes to research that underpins the threat to human health from pollutants in the ocean," said Dr. Frances M. D. Gulland, the lead author of the study who worked at The Marine Mammal Center for 25 years.
INFORMATION:
The Marine Mammal Center is a leading contributor to the global body of research and knowledge about marine mammal medicine and ocean health. The Center generates research findings and scientific outputs at volumes comparable to top academic institutions and prides itself on gathering and providing open research data that is free to access, reuse, repurpose and redistribute.
In 2010, the Center brought together an array of international researchers to form the Sea Lion Cancer Consortium to further investigate this disease, multiple of whom helped co-author the paper. The research work was funded by the Geoffrey Hughes Fellowship, the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation joint program for the Ecology of Infectious Disease, the National Marine Fisheries Service Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Program, and the Natural Environment Research Council.
ABOUT THE MARINE MAMMAL CENTER:
Headquartered on the site of a former Cold War missile base, The Marine Mammal Center is a global leader in marine mammal health, science and conservation, and is the largest marine mammal hospital in the world. The Center's teaching hospital and training programs operate globally, with its headquarters in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, part of the National Park Service. Expert teams from the Center travel around the world to work with emerging first responders and has itself rescued more than 24,000 marine mammals from 600 miles of its authorized rescue area of California coastline and the Big Island of Hawai'i. The Center's mission is to advance global ocean conservation through marine mammal rescue and rehabilitation, scientific research, and education.
For more information, please visit MarineMammalCenter.org.
PULLMAN, Wash. - Fortune 500 firms with strong growth profiles are more susceptible to "cooking the books" than smaller, struggling companies, according to a recent study published in Justice Quarterly.
Researchers from Washington State University, Pennsylvania State University and Miami University examined the characteristics of more than 250 U.S. public corporations that were involved in financial securities fraud identified in Securities and Exchange Commission filings from 2005-2013. They were then compared to a control sample of firms that were not named in SEC fraud filings.
Clear trends emerged in the risk of fraud including corporations that were listed in the Fortune 500, traded on the New York Stock Exchange and had strong growth expectations. ...
(LOS ANGELES) - There are many mechanisms by which the body responds to foreign invaders. One of these involves the T-cells of the immune system, which have a number of different proteins on their surface called "checkpoint proteins." These checkpoint proteins bind to proteins on the surface of other cells and can result in either stimulation or suppression of T-cell activity. Normally, surface proteins on foreign or invading cells will produce a stimulation of T-cell activity against these cells, while T-cell suppression is a built-in mechanism to prevent the immune system from attacking the body's own normal cells.
Tumor cells, ...
Australia's and New Zealand's first set of clinical guidelines for children's head injuries has been created by a network of specialists based at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI).
The guidelines, developed by the Paediatric Research in Emergency Departments International Collaborative (PREDICT) and published in Emergency Medicine Australasia, will allow emergency department clinicians to best diagnose and treat children's head injuries while reducing unnecessary exposure to radiation from CT scans. They also address head injuries in children with underlying problems, such as a bleeding disorder.
Matthew ...
PITTSBURGH, 2 February, 2021 - Researchers seeking to develop on-demand and behaviorally congruent HIV prevention options for people who practice anal sex are reporting the results of three early phase clinical trials of rectal microbicides at this week's HIV Research for Prevention (HIV R4P) Virtual Conference. The Phase I studies, led by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Microbicide Trials Network (MTN), found both of two gel-based products well-tolerated, with higher doses of the active drugs likely required to provide protection from HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). The results are being presented ...
Hydrocarbons and petroleum are almost synonymous in environmental science. After all, oil reserves account for nearly all the hydrocarbons we encounter. But the few hydrocarbons that trace their origin to biological sources may play a larger ecological role than scientists originally suspected.
A team of researchers at UC Santa Barbara and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution investigated this previously neglected area of oceanography for signs of an overlooked global cycle. They also tested how its existence might impact the ocean's response to oil spills.
"We demonstrated that there is a massive and rapid hydrocarbon cycle that occurs in the ocean, and that it is distinct from the ocean's capacity to respond to petroleum input," said Professor David Valentine(link ...
A new Veterans Affairs study finds that delays in undergoing colonoscopy following an abnormal stool test increase the risk of a colorectal cancer diagnosis and cancer-related death.
The results appeared online in the journal Gastroenterology in January 2021.
In a retrospective study of more than 200,000 Veterans, the researchers found that patients who received colonoscopy more than 13 months after an abnormal stool blood test were up to 1.3 times more likely to have colorectal cancer, compared with those who had colonoscopy up to three months after the stool test. Odds of an advanced stage of cancer at diagnosis were up to 1.7 times higher when colonoscopy was delayed beyond 16 months.
The findings also ...
The complex mechanics determining how galaxies spin, grow, cluster and die have been revealed following the release of all the data gathered during a massive seven-year Australian-led astronomy research project.
The scientists observed 13 galaxies at a time, building to a total of 3068, using a custom-built instrument called the Sydney-AAO Multi-Object Integral-Field Spectrograph (SAMI), connected to the 4-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales. The telescope is operated by the Australian National University.
Overseen by the ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics ...
A combination of genetic mutations may explain the higher incidence of and poorer outcomes from pediatric leukemia in Hispanic and Latino children, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. They said a novel therapeutic drug combination - as well as testing for these mutations - may help address the disparity.
Hispanic and Latino children are between 1.2 and 1.75 times more likely to develop B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL), the most common childhood cancer, than non-Hispanic and Latino children. They also have a 40% higher death rate than their counterparts after correcting for socioeconomic factors. Dr. Sinisa Dovat, a researcher and pediatric ...
COLUMBUS, Ohio - People who start adulthood with a body mass index (BMI) in the normal range and move later in life to being overweight - but never obese - tend to live the longest, a new study suggests.
Adults in this category lived longer than even those whose BMI stayed in the normal range throughout their life. Those who started adulthood as obese and continued to add weight had the highest mortality rate.
"The impact of weight gain on mortality is complex. It depends on both the timing and the magnitude of weight gain and where BMI started," said Hui Zheng, lead author of the study and associate ...
According to the Barker hypothesis (Hales and Barker 1992) (also referred to as "small baby syndrome"), infants with too low body weight have an increased risk of suffering from cardiovascular diseases, high blood pressure, diabetes and chronic kidney diseases in adulthood. According to this hypothesis, fetal protective mechanisms enable adaptation to unfavorable intrauterine conditions (chronic oxygen or nutrient deficiency) and allow for fetal survival. At the same time, however, they lead to permanent structural and functional strains and changes into adulthood. The comprehensive study recently published in Nature Communications now clarifies central mechanisms of this phenomenon.
Fetuin-A plays a key role
Under the program of the Swiss National ...
