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Being overweight or obese increases the risk of developing or dying breast cancer for a long time. New research suggests why: certain breast cancer tumors may feed adjacent fat cells.
The findings could help scientists find ways to treat triple-negative breast cancer. This is notoriously aggressive and has a low survival rate. Additionally, the results could also apply to any cancer that uses fat as an energy source, according to a report released in Natural Communications on Wednesday.
Triple negative accounts for around 15% of all breast cancers. It tends to be more common in black women and women under the age of 40, and is more likely to recur than other cancers.
Breast tumor cells appear to have access to the content of adipocytes by thrusting straw-like structures into the adipocytes and removing the lipids stored therein.
If researchers could find ways to block tunnels to adjacent adipocytes without injuring patients, they could often have a way to cure fatal cancer, said Jeremy Williams, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, San Francisco, the study’s lead author.
“Aggressive cancer cells can help them grow to adopt a variety of nutritional sources, including stimulating fat cells in the breast and releasing lipids,” Williams said. “In the future, new therapies may starve tumor cells by preventing access to lipids from adjacent cells.” Lipids are fatty compounds such as cholesterol, which are primarily used for energy storage in the body.
Williams and his colleagues performed multiple experiments, some using tissue from breast cancer patients and some using mouse models of breast cancer patients.
In experiments using only human tissue, the researchers examined adipocytes at various distances from tumor cells. They found that the closer the adipocytes to tumor cells, the more depleted lipids.
The tumor stopped growing when researchers blocked the ability of tumor cells to build straw-like structures, officially known as gap junctions.
They lost some of their ability to create gap junctions as tumor cells in breast cancer patients found similar results in genetically regulated mouse models. When tissue was embedded in the mouse, the mouse was protected.
“We knocked out a single gene and impaired tumor formation and progression,” Williams said.
Williams and his colleagues began to see mechanisms that described previous discoveries from the lab where he worked.
“These tumors burned fatty acids as energy sources,” he said. “It seemed like an urgent question to answer where the fatty acids came from.”
After all, some drugs that inhibit the formation of gap junctions have been studied in early stage clinical trials for other purposes, Williams said.
How can cancer grow and feed itself.”
Dr. Julia McGuinness, a breast cancer specialist and an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University, and a surgeons university, said it was the first evidence of a mechanism that shows the link between fat and cancer.
It also suggests one route to treating aggressive cancers that don’t have a good treatment,” McGuinness said. “We already know that obese women with these types of cancer have worse outcomes.”
New research may also suggest that lifestyle modifications that help women achieve healthy weights could also be protected from such cancers, McGuinness said. “Slim down can protect you,” she said, adding that obesity has been shown to be a risk factor for all breast cancer.
The study’s authors found ways to explore the mechanisms that link fat to breast cancer growth in ways that humans could not test. According to Justin Barco, an Ingram professor of cancer research at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
“They found new ways to grow and feed cancer,” Barco said. “If some of the same effects are observed in humans, it could be a feed that differs in the way patients treat them.”
But there is a warning, Barco said. “For example, I don’t know if this is the main mechanism by which breast cancer develops in humans,” he said. “But that makes a lot of sense.”
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Here are some tips to reduce the risks for both men and women, as well as recommendations from experts regarding how often they are tested for the disease.
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