Anticancer Res. 1999 Nov-Dec;19(6A):4907-12. |
Pernicious cachexia- a different view of
cancer.
Zajicek G.
H.H. Humphrey Center for Experimental Medicine and Cancer Research, Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem, Israel. gzajicek@what-is-cancer.com
Despite intensive effort to cure breast cancer, treatment generally fails, as
evidenced by the age adjusted mortality from breast cancer. For 60 years,
breast cancer mortality remained virtually constant. As treatment failed to
improve the life prospect of the average patient, it is based on false
premises, e.g., Halsted's hypothesis, according to which the tumor is the only
threat to the patient. Yet there is more to cancer than just the tumor. Two
hallmarks of cancer, cachexia, and paraneoplasia, are usually ignored, since it
is assumed that they are caused by the tumor. But, what if it is the other way
around, and cancer is first of all a cachexia accompanied by a tumor? At least
this could explain why in most cancers treatment fails. Cancer is a chronic
systemic disease with local manifestations. Like arteriosclerosis, that is also
systemic and manifested solely by its local manifestations, e.g., stroke and
myocardial infarction. In the same way as treatment of an ailing heart does not
cure the underlying arteriosclerosis, tumor removal does not cure cancer, since
being "metabolically" systemic. It is proposed here that carcinogens
deplete a vital substance and induce a metabolic deficiency that ends in
cachexia. In order to survive, the organism grows a protective organ, the tumor,
that replenishes the missing substance. During pre-clinical phase of cancer,
deficiency is slight and compensated even by a minute tumor. With time it gets
worse and the tumor has to grow more and more in order to make up for the loss,
causing pain and secondary damage to vital functions. The patient seeks help
and the disease starts its clinical course. When deficiency worsens, the
patient becomes cachectic and dies. Such a metabolic relationship exists in
pernicious anemia, that illustrates how a tumor might be protective. Cancer is
viewed here as pernicious cachexia induced by the loss of a vital metabolite
and compensated by the tumor. Until the discovery of the missing substance,
treatment ought to preserve the tumor and alleviate its secondary manifestations.
Publication Types:
· Review
PMID: 10697603 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]