You Oughtta Be Glad You Have Cancer!

“There is a growing body of evidence that people who get cancer have a reduced risk of getting Alzheimer’s—and vice versa. The biology is intuitive. People with cancer have too much cell growth, of the wrong kind. People with Alzheimer’s have too little cell growth, or at least neuronal cell growth and re-growth.” Sanford Rose 

Dolors & Sense

by Sanford Rose

KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—5/14/12—You Oughtta Be Glad You Have Cancer? Not really, but at least you’ll get to keep your marbles.

There is a growing body of evidence that people who get cancer have a reduced risk of getting Alzheimer’s—and vice versa.

The biology is intuitive. People with cancer have too much cell growth, of the wrong kind. People with Alzheimer’s have too little cell growth, or at least neuronal cell growth and re-growth.

It turns out that cancer and Alzheimer’s share common genetic pathways via an enzyme, labeled Pin 1, which, as you guessed, has a profound impact on cell life and death.

In fact, Pin 1 may be the much-sought-after molecular clock, determining when cells die or whether, in the case of cancer cells, they die at all (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20735350; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1868500/; http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e1442).

“Over-express” Pin 1 and there is high likelihood of too luxuriant cell growth and resulting cancer. When an overabundant Pin teams up with another protein, dubbed p53, that has turned rogue, one gets an especially virulent breast cancer.

“Under-express” Pin and you get a lot of early cell death, and the risk of Alzheimer’s increases.

A recent study puts some numbers on the inverse association between cancer and Alzheimer’s:

Study participants with cancer at study initiation had a 33 percent lower risk of AD (Alzheimer’s Disease) compared with those who did not have incident cancer. Participants with smoking-related cancers had a 74 percent lower risk. (Hmm, sounds as if the worse the cancer, the better protected are the grey cells.)

Conversely, those with incident AD had a 61 percent lower risk of developing cancer.

Now if only we can find a reliable way of, in medical cant, up-regulating Pin 1 in people at high risk for AD while down-regulating it in people at more significant risk of developing cancer.

The drug industry is currently at work trying to develop an anti-Pin pill. Pinning down Pin will not make cancer fun, but it could help reduce it to more of a pinprick.