WHY DOES CANCER COME BACK?

DJ_DHANA

Here I'm gonna share something that I don't want you to share with everyone. In this month of Breast Cancer awareness, let me give you some insights on cancer relapse which is more prevalent in breast cancers. So why does cancer come back?
We might have heard of stories of the patients who had cancer relapse even after 10 years. There are instances when patients are told that they are cured of cancer and sent back home but later again diagnosed with cancer. So where does cancer go in these 10 years and how they manage to come back. So here is the possible reason or can I say a predictive hypothesis (under investigation)? When a cancer patient is being treated with a therapy (like targeted, chemo, radio, etc.,), the cancer cells that are metabolically active (vulnerable) takes up the drug and dies but few might still survive. How? They go into a metabolically inactive dormant (Sleep) state where they could take no more drugs, masking all the targets and might survive. They remain in this dormant state for a long period until all the therapies are resumed and when the conditions are quite favorable, it relapse back. So when it relapse, they behave more aggressively than they were ever before. Why? Think of someone who remained dormant for 10 years, the amount of energy it would've saved. That's why cancer is very difficult to treat after relapse. So the most important thing is, I don't want you to share this info with the cancer patients and scare them away as it's just a hypothesis with a lot of speculations and it's not yet accepted by the entire research community. But you can share this info with the research aspirants who wanna solve the critical healthcare problems. Having worked with cancer and stem cells, I fear that this hypothesis might be true in the long run.

DO YOU REMEMBER ANYTHING BEFORE AGE 3?

A few days back I attended an interesting talk that turned out to be a debate at the end. The talk was about "Recovery of lost memories in infant mice". The researcher described that according to engram theory any event that is occurring /occurred will be stored in the brain in a specific engram cell (a subpopulation of the neural cell) which if elicited by the same pattern of stimuli will get reactivated and the memory can be restored back. For eg: Consider a scenario where you visit a cafeteria to have a coffee with your friend/love. The smell of the coffee will be stored in a specific engram and conversation you had in a different engram. So when you go back to the same cafeteria and have the same coffee, the smell (stimuli) will elicit your stored memory in the specific engram. While not all the time it works, if the pattern of stimuli and the threshold varies then the brain may either fail to recover or will partially recover it. This is the reason why we sometimes feel that some events have already happened in the past but still, we won't be able to recover the whole memory of it. But unfortunately, infants tend to lack this ability to recover the memory, a condition known as "Infantile amnesia". Researchers say that the infant memories are most probably not lost but became inaccessible over time which can be recovered back. On the other hand, the neuroplasticity theory says that the brain recovers its memory by rewiring itself. That's why synapse since birth (2500) tend to grow rapidly and reach 15000 by age 3. While most of the researchers dispute about the acceptance of these theories, still the fact by which the brain works remain a mystery. So do you remember anything before age 3?

SMOKING IS NOT THE ONLY CAUSE OF CANCER

"SMOKING IS NOT THE ONLY CAUSE OF CANCER" argued a gentleman as I asked him not to smoke in a restaurant. Yes, he was right! After carrying out one year of research in cancer, I feel I am eligible enough to share my views on this statement. People always have this query in their mind "Why some people are more susceptible to cancer while others aren't. Many of us might have heard about numerous carcinogenic agents that could cause cancer. One such familiar carcinogenic agent is nicotine in tobacco. Say out of 10,000 people who get exposed to this carcinogenic substance only a few(1%) of those will probably develop cancer. So why is that so?? One reason is that the cancer is not just one disease but rather it is hundreds of diseases. It depends on multiple factors like genetic makeup, immune defense and external factors. Many of us might have developed a tumor in our lifetime, our immune system might have fought against it and erased it w/o our knowledge. So when the immune system becomes weak and also when the environment is quite favorable for the development of cancer, that is when cancer evolves. Hence it's not the single carcinogen which could cause cancer but a combination of multiple factors. That's why cancer is more complicated and difficult to treat as there is no single cause for developing cancer. By this explanation, I didn't mean to say that smoking will not cause cancer but it increases your risk of developing cancer. Not only you, as a passive smoker it increases the risk of others around you. Why put yourself and others at the risk of developing this deadly disease that doesn't have a complete cure yet #Live and let others live a peaceful life#