Newswise, July 11, 2017– Changes in immune activity appear
to signal a growing brain tumor five years before symptoms arise, new research
has found.
Interactions among proteins that relay information from one
immune cell to another are weakened in the blood of brain cancer patients
within five years before the cancer is diagnosed, said lead researcher Judith Schwartzbaum of
The Ohio State University.
That information could one day lead to earlier diagnosis of
brain cancer, said Schwartzbaum, an associate professor of epidemiology and member of Ohio State’s Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The
study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, focused on gliomas,
which make up about 80 percent of brain cancer diagnoses. Average survival time
for the most common type of glioma is 14 months.
Symptoms vary and include headaches, memory loss, personality
changes, blurred vision and difficulty speaking. On average, the cancer is
diagnosed three months after the onset of symptoms and when tumors are
typically advanced.
“It’s important to identify the early stages of tumor
development if we hope to intervene more effectively,” Schwartzbaum said. “If
you understand those early steps, maybe you can design treatments to block
further tumor growth.”
While widespread blood testing of people without symptoms of
this rare tumor would be impractical, this research could pave the way for
techniques to identify brain cancer earlier and allow for more-effective
treatment, Schwartzbaum said.
Schwartzbaum evaluated blood samples from 974 people, half of
whom went on to receive a brain-cancer diagnosis in the years after their blood
was drawn. The samples came from Norway’s Janus Serum Bank.
Because of previous research – including her own on the
relationship between allergies and brain cancer – Schwartzbaum was interested
in the role of cytokines, proteins that communicate with one another and with
immune cells to spark immune responses. Schwartzbaum’s previous work found that
allergies appeared to offer protection against brain cancer.
In this study, Schwartzbaum evaluated 277 cytokines in the
blood samples and found less cytokine interaction in the blood of people who
developed cancer.
“There was a clear weakening of those interactions in the
group who developed brain cancer and it’s possible this plays a role in tumor
growth and development,” Schwartzbaum said.
Cytokine activity in cancer is especially important to
understand because it can play a good-guy role in terms of fighting tumor
development, but it also can play a villain and support a tumor by suppressing
the immune system, she said.
In addition to discovering the weakening of cytokine interactions
in the blood of future cancer patients, the researchers found a handful of
cytokines that appear to play an especially important role in glioma
development.
The results of this study must be confirmed and further
evaluated before it could translate to changes in the earlier diagnosis of
brain cancer, but the discovery offers important insights, Schwartzbaum said.
“It’s possible this could also happen with other tumors – that
this is a general sign of tumor development,” she said.
The research was supported by the National Cancer Institute.
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