Potentially useful cancer news....

Today's post: Friday, 4-25-2008

This story appeared last Weds.: (It has some exciting implications that were NOT in the article. We talk about those after the article.)

“Scan Detects Oxygen Levels in Tumors

WEDNESDAY, April 23 (HealthDay News) -- New research suggests that scientists are close to developing a simple way to measure oxygen levels in tumors, giving doctors a heads-up about what kind of treatment is best for individual patients.

The findings fit into an emerging trend of individualized treatment for patients with cancer instead of treating people the same way, said Dr. Mark Dewhirst, a professor of radiation oncology at Duke University Medical Center.

“If successful, [the trend] will revolutionize the way that we treat cancer," said Dewhirst, who co-wrote a commentary accompanying the new study, published April 22 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.


Scientists began realizing the important role of oxygen in tumors about 50 years ago, said study co-author James Mitchell, branch chief of radiation biology at the U.S. National Cancer Institute's Center for Cancer Research. The scientists discovered that tumors with higher concentrations of oxygen were more susceptible to radiation, he said.

"Radiation damages cells by causing damage to DNA, and one particular type of damage renders the DNA molecule non-reparable," Mitchell said. But less oxygen in the tumor allows tumor cells to survive more easily by making the DNA destruction process more difficult, he said.

According to Dewhirst, the same is true for chemotherapy drugs, which also don't work as well when tumors have less oxygen.

Lower levels of oxygen create other problems, Dewhirst. "One would think at first that lack of oxygen would make tumors unhealthy and easy to kill," he said. "But actually, the opposite happens -- tumor cells that lack oxygen become more aggressive and more difficult to kill." Tumors with lower oxygen levels even spread more easily through the body, he said.

Doctors can check oxygen levels in patients by inserting a needle. But doctors can't insert needles into some patients, and. in others, it's difficult to insert the needle deep enough, Mitchell said.

In the new study, the researchers tested a scanning technique called pulsed electron paramagnetic resonance imaging and used it in tandem with magnetic resonance imaging. The study authors said they were able to successfully measure oxygen levels in tumors in mice by using the non-invasive technology.

"The imaging that is described in this study provides all of the information necessary to evaluate oxygen levels in tumors as well as to examine underlying causes for the lack of oxygen," Dewhirst said. "The fact that all of the imaging is completely non-invasive provides the ability to perform this measurement more than once, (meaning) this could be used to monitor the effectiveness of cancer therapy." “

X* X* X* X

This information strongly suggests that cancer cells either die or fail to thrive & expand as much if they get too much oxygen.

Sure, it would be nice to know how nasty a cancer is before treating it & how much hurt a treatment has put on it after you do the treatment.

The authors of this study are quite right about that.

But this seems to ignore an opening you could drive a semi through.

Why not do things that stuff your body’s cells with extra oxygen?

That might help your immune system prevent or kill off cancers in the first place or offer a way to multiply the effect of cancer treatments.

1. Specifically, if you do strength training exercises for at least a few sets where you do it until you cannot do another repetition, you will find you are out of breath. Your body then recovers in part by taking in extra oxygen.

Similarly, if you do vigorous cardio for even 8 to 24 minutes where you do periodic surges of high effort, sometimes called interval training, you will find your body feels like it is glowing afterwards & onlookers can actually see a kind of blush on your skin from the sharply increased blood flow.

Guess what?

Almost every cell in your body is experiencing extra blood flow & oxygenation.

These effects may well be a good bit of the reason why people who exercise get far fewer cancers. If cancer cells weaken with extra oxygen, these effects give your cells extra oxygen & may well give any cancer cells in your body a serious hard time.

2. It’s been known for some time that if you heat up your body before & during chemo or radiation treatments for cancer, it will kill off more cancer cells.

And, the information we reported here that taking resveratrol tends to harm cancer cells directly AND increases the kill rate of cancer treatments if you start the resveratrol well before them also shows promise.

THIS new information suggests that you may well sharply increase the kill rate of cancer treatments by using hyperbaric oxygen right before & after cancer treatments or even during them if it can be made safe to do so.

So, if you know any cancer researchers, please pass along this post.

And, please consider regular exercise of these two kinds each week if you aren’t doing them already. You may kill off some cancer cells in addition to the other LONG list of benefits you get !!