"For years, scientists have viewed cancer as a localized glitch in which cells refuse to stop dividing. But a new study suggests that, in certain organs, tumors actively communicate with the brain to trick it into protecting them. Scientists have long known that nerves grow into some tumors and that tumors containing lots of nerves usually lead to a worse prognosis."
"Prior to our study, most of the focus has been this local interaction between the nerve [endings] and the tumor, says Chengcheng Jin, an assistant professor of cancer biology at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-author of the study, which was published today in Nature. Jin and her colleagues discovered that lung cancer tumors in mice can use these nerve endings to communicate way beyond their close vicinity"
"Setting up this circuit starts with a process called innervation, in which lung tumors wire themselves into the vagal nervesthe internal information highway that connects the vital organs to the brain. Within this highway, Jin's team identified a specialized group of sensory neurons that communicate directly with the central nervous system. Our study suggests that the tumor actually hijacks these existing pathways to promote itself, explains Rui Chang, an associate professor of neuroscience at the Yale School of Medicine and a co-author of the study."
Lung tumors can form neural connections to the vagus nerve through innervation and engage specialized sensory neurons that relay signals to the central nervous system. Tumors employ these vagal pathways to send signals to the nucleus of the solitary tract in the brain stem, altering neuroimmune responses and recruiting protective processes that favor tumor survival. High tumor innervation correlates with worse prognosis. The same neuroimmune circuit identified in mice has evidence of existence in humans, indicating a conserved mechanism linking tumor innervation to systemic neural and immune modulation.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]