Tag Archives: cancer

Sugar Craze – Is Artificial Bad?

Posted on November 20, 2017 by | 1 comment

Everyone likes a little sweet in their life, whether it’s that extra chocolate chip cookie, or adding a teaspoon of sugar to your morning coffee.

Figure 1. Coffee with a sugar cube being added to it. (Image source)

Because sugar can have many adverse effects on health, artificial sweeteners have been used instead to provide the same sweet taste. These include Sweet n Low, Splenda, and Equal just to name a few. However, even though these alternatives provide a low calorie substitution, there has been a lot of controversy to whether or not they are actually better for your health.

Figure 2. Artificial sweetener packets, including Splenda and Equal. (Image source)

Sugar can cause many different problems when eaten at a high level, including; type 2 diabetes, obesity, inflammation, heart disease and even cancer.

The first artificial sweetener, saccharin, was discovered in 1879 when a chemist discovered that his food tasted sweeter after work and went on to taste all the chemicals he was using in his lab. After that, more artificial sweeteners have been found and have been targeted towards diabetics, and those wanting to lose weight.

The FDA is the organization that approves foods and drugs with the responsibility of protecting the public health. There are currently eight approved artificial sweeteners in the United States. These eight approved sugars have all been deemed safe by the FDA as long as they are used in moderation.

So why do so many people rebel against the idea of ingesting anything artificially manufactured?

The media plays a big part in this. There were several false animal studies done on rats that linked artificial sweeteners to cancer. While the FDA states that these were poorly executed experiments and that they provided false conclusions, the public still has a hard time getting this information.

Figure 3. Two laboratory rats. (Image source)

In 1980, after a study falsely connected aspartame with brain cancer, there was a wide media outbreak that ended with FDA banning aspartame. However, once more research was done, the FDA quickly lifted their ban in 1981. The FDA continues to state that aspartame is safe to consume at acceptable levels. Yet, even with this research available, many people still believe that aspartame is to blame for many adverse symptoms.

Why?

Research is currently hard to understand at a public level, and the truth can be difficult to find as people can form an accidental bias when reporting.

To help the public truly understand these controversies, there has to be a way in the future to allow the public better access to these scientific discoveries. Making science more accessible will benefit society as a whole as more individuals will be able to form their own opinions.

For now though, it is safe to say that you can fill your sweet tooth craving with an artificial sweetener instead.

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Zika Virus…a Cure for Brain Cancer?

Posted on October 30, 2017 by | 2 comments

 

A summary of ZIKV Photo from: Google Images

ZIKV is a virus that is spread by daytime-active Aedes mosquitoes. The infection mostly causes very mild symptoms similar to Dengue Fever. Babies in the womb can have slightly more adverse effects such as brain malformations and birth defects. Researchers studied how ZIKV was causing these problems for babies. One main concern that arose was that ZIKV was causing the death of stem cells which are in high abundance in babies.

Recently experts have been studying how to use ZIKV to treat brain cancer, specifically glioblastoma. Glioblastoma is a type of brain cancer that is very common in adults and can grow and spread quickly. Due to its rapid growth, glioblastoma is tricky to treat and the common treatments, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery, are unable to fully remove it.

Taking the knowledge that ZIKV targets stem cells in babies, researchers investigated whether or not ZIKV would target cancer cells in adults as they have relatively few stem cells. An article published in The Journal of Experimental Science reports the findings of this experiment. In living mice and donated human brain tissue samples, ZIKV was seen to kill the cancer cells. This is a huge step forward in the research.

Human trials are still some way away but so far the results look promising. The next step before human trials is to try and modify the virus to make a tamer version with the same effect on the cancer cells. This ensures that patients will be safe from other symptoms when treated.

For a general summary of the research conducted, the following YouTube video is informative:

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Although the research is still in its early stages, I feel that it could have a lot of potential once human trials begin. This could lead to a treatment for cancer that is more effective than what we have today.

~ Sajni Shah

References:

1) Zhe Zhu, Matthew J. Gorman, et al. “Zika virus has oncolytic activity against glioblastoma stem cells.”  Journal of Experimental Medicine Oct 2017, 214 (10) 2843-2857.

2) Roberts, Michelle. “Zika virus used to treat aggressive brain cancer.” BBC News, BBC, 5 Sept. 2017, www.bbc.com/news/health-41146628.

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Vitamin supplementation can actually be harmful for your health.

Posted on October 17, 2017 by | 4 comments

Vitamin Supplements Source: Flickr

I bet you have taken vitamin supplementation at some point in your life. Why not? It can only be good for you, since all we hear about is how taking vitamins is good for your health, right? Wrong. Turns out there is a big misconception and that overdosing your body with vitamin intake can actually have detrimental effects for your body, even to the point to even increase the risk of getting cancer.

There is such thing as vitamin overdose which is toxic for your body. You might think that the more the better, right? Turns out excess of certain types of vitamins are not simply excreted by your body as one might think, but they rather build up in your organism and negatively affect your health. Specifically, the vitamins that negatively impact your health in excess are vitamins A, D, E and B. 

Different vitamin excess causes different symptoms. For vitamin A, some symptoms include: headaches, irritability, abdominal pain, nausea, renal stones, anorexia, etc. for vitamin D, they include: anorexia, constipation, depression, hypertension, seizures, etc. For vitamin E: fatigue, weakness, hemorrhage, affected inmune system, etc. Lastly symptoms for vitamin B include: paralysis, convulsions, fatigue, light sensibility, liver damage, insomnia, skin lesions, etc. And this are just a few out of a longer list of the symptoms for each type of vitamin.

This excess is rarely due to overconsumption of vitamins through food, since vitamin content in fruits and vegetables is not as high as in supplements. Vitamin intake through a healthy and balanced diet is usually enough to be good for our health without having the risk exceeding and get to toxic levels. These excess are mainly due to vitamin supplement intake. Furthermore, there are several studies that indicate that taking vitamin supplementation for a long period of time might increase the risk of cancer. For example, long term use of vitamin A and vitamin E supplementation have been linked with incidence of lung cancer.

This is not say vitamin supplementation is always bad for your health. There are many studies about all the positive effects of vitamins. We need vitamins for our body to function optimally. However, dietitians suggest to take vitamin supplementation in specific cases were intake of certain vitamins is crucial, for example vitamin B9 during pregnancy. If not required for a specific medical reason, people should aim to obtain vitamins from food sources rather than by supplements to avoid toxic levels that can affect your health negatively. Sometimes more does not necessarily means better, but rather the oposite.

-Andrea Olaizola.

 

 

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Video

Using Nanomachines to Destroy Cancer Cells in Just 60 Seconds!

In present day, when one develops cancer, the most common technology or treatment for these diseases are radiation therapy, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, targeted therapy, etc. More recently, a new way of destroying cancer cells have been discovered by researchers at Durham (UK), North Carolina State and Rice University; a group led by Professor James Tour.

Professor Tour and his team have previously worked on and created nanomachines such as motor-bearing molecules and peptide-carrying nanomachines designed to target specific cells. These studies have been previously published in Nature.

“We thought it might be possible to attach these nanomachines to the cell membrane, and then turn them on to see what happened,” said Tour. This resulted in developing these tiny, light-activating nanomachines that can target specific cells and drill through their membrane, activating apoptosis of the cell.

“These nanomachines are so tiny that 50,000 of them put together is still about the diameter of a single strand of hair,” says Tour.

Each nanomachines has a car shape, with four wheels that are motorized which allows for propulsion along cell surfaces. They are designed to target a cell’s lipid bilayer membrane. Once reaching the membrane, the nanomachine will either deliver drugs to kill the cell or the nanomachine itself will activate the cell to be destroyed.

Because this is using a molecular mechanical action and is not a biological creation, it is very unlikely for a cancer cell to develop resistance to these motorized machines. This is a great development in producing new drugs that can prevent the targeted bacteria or viruses from developing resistance and growing stronger.

These nanomachine motors were tested on live cells, including human prostate cancer cells. Experiments have shown that without an UV light trigger, the motors could still locate the specific cells of interest, but stayed on the targeted cells’ surface and were unable to drill into the cells. However, when triggered with UV light, the motors rapidly drilled through the membranes.

 

“Once developed, this approach could provide a potential step change in non-invasive cancer treatment and greatly improve survival rates and patient welfare globally,” said Dr. Robert Pal from Durham University, that collaborated with James Tour.

So perhaps in another 20-30 years, these nanomachines will be widely used in cancer treatment, and may possibly decrease the death rate from cancer. A very interesting idea to think about.

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(Video: James Tour Explains Nanomachines at Rice University)

                               – Ziyi Wang

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Incurable Lymphomas: Can remission last longer?

Posted on October 1, 2017 by | 1 comment

Lymphoma is the 5th most common cancer in Canada and can be very aggressive. Most lymphomas are not curable, so long lasting remission has been the recent goal of treatments. Lymphoma patients have been treated for years with a chemotherapy regimen including an antibody called Rituximab. Antibodies are proteins that can recognize cancerous cells and tag them for destruction. Rituximab has been extremely effective in treating aggressive lymphomas, but the American Society of Oncology has been developing an alternative antibody, Obinutuzumab, with the goal of improving the length of remission.  In a recent trial, they found that Obinutuzumab increases remission length in some forms of lymphoma, but not for others.

Lymphoma is a cancer that most commonly affects the lymph nodes, but can also appear in other organs in the body. In the most advanced cases, lymphoma can spread to the bone marrow. Effective treatments are therefore very important, but challenging to develop. Many years ago, doctors treated all cancers including lymphomas, with radiation, however lymphomas are able to spread quickly, making radiation challenging. Radiation is also unable to treat lymphoma that has spread to the bone marrow, so it is not a treatment option for advanced lymphomas.

Chemotherapy is able to treat cancers that involve multiple areas of the body, including the bone marrow, which radiation is unable to do. When Rituximab was developed as a supplementary antibody to previous chemotherapies, it dramatically increased the effectiveness of chemotherapy and the length of remission for lymphoma patients. Obinutuzumab is a similar antibody to Rituximab, so doctors chose to test it to determine if it works even better than Rituximab. The American Society of Oncology performed a randomized trial on 1,418 lymphoma patients to test the effectiveness of Obinutuzumab in prolonging remission in comparison to Rituximab. Obinutuzumab was at least equally as successful as Rituximab in all patients, and for certain types of lymphoma, it was found to be more successful than Rituximab.

Chemotherapy is a great example of the applications of chemistry to the medical field. Chemotherapy uses antibodies to target specific cells, which requires tagging those cells for destruction. Chemotherapy also uses other molecules that prevent reactions that harm the DNA of a cell, which is a common cause of cancer. Advances in chemistry have a significant impact on cancer treatments in the form of chemotherapy. Since Obinutuzumab succeeds in prolonging remission for some lymphomas, further advances in chemotherapy could lead even more successful treatments for all lymphomas.

-Sydney Inthof

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The harm from long term microwave radiation.

Posted on September 18, 2017 by | 1 comment

Cancer rates are gradually increasing and a potential source of radiation causing this growth is the electromagnetic waves from cell phones. As technology advances, researchers try to fix any flaws within electronics. These could include bugs in software or hardware malfunctions, but a constant concern are the waves emitted. Many studies were conducted denying the correlation between cell phones and cancer, but there are some which hint at possibilities.

In a New York Times article by Pollack, he discusses the effect of radiation from cellphones on rats. In this experiment, the animals were exposed to different degrees of radiation, that would  be emitted from cellphones, for nine hours daily over a period of two years. This resulted with a minority group of 2-3% developing brain cancer and 5-7% developing Schwannomas in their heart. Although there appears to be a correlation between cancer growth and cellular radiation, this is a significantly small scale affected.

https://static01.nyt.com/video/players/offsite/index.html?videoId=100000004441354

Kesari et al. conduct a more detailed study showing the effect on biological systems due to cell phone radiation. In their research, they found that microwave fields cause chronic stress creating reactive oxygen species (ROS) leading to oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is caused by oxygen and free radicals leading to toxic damage in the system and eventually carcinogens. However, like the case with the rats, only a small number affected would ultimately be diagnosed with cancer.

Exposure to Cellphone Radiation

Although both cases hint towards radiation types from cell phone lead to carcinogens, both reports conclude further research is required. The emissions in the experiment is the same type has those from cell phones, but not in the same strength. Further research could be done such as using weaker radiation strengths, but until then, there’s no apparent danger from using cell phones.

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