Deterioration from treatment
Scientists at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center conducted a study on hormone therapy for prostate cancer. According to the data obtained, in some cases, cancer can not only survive therapy, but also spread further through the body, or go into a more aggressive form. In addition, the researchers also proposed the idea of a simple blood test that can help predict whether a transformation will occur.
Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of death among men, second only to lung cancer. Every year, about 30,000 men die from prostate cancer in the United States alone.
The most common type of prostate cancer is adenocarcinoma. This type, being diagnosed at an early stage, usually responds well to treatment and responds to treatment, including hormone therapy aimed against androgens – male sex hormones that stimulate tumor growth. However, in some cases, instead of stopping growth, some tumor cells turn from adenocarcinoma into neuroendocrine tumor cells – a rather rare and aggressive type of cancer. Such a tumor grows rapidly, begins to metastasize early, and also practically does not respond to either hormone therapy or chemotherapy.
According to the study, about a quarter of patients receiving hormone therapy face a recurrence of the tumor in the form of treatment-resistant neuroendocrine cancer.
The scientists also conducted a study of the interaction of cancer cells with the tumor microenvironment – cells adjacent to cancer cells. After analyzing this interaction in laboratory mice, the researchers identified an associated increase in the level of the amino acid glutamine.
Interestingly, the effect of antiandrogenic hormone therapy causes changes in the tumor microenvironment, which leads to the transformation of adenocarcinoma cells into neuroendocrine ones.
An additional test showed that the level of glutamine in the blood plasma of patients with a treatment-resistant form of prostate cancer is higher than in patients with a treatable form.
It was previously known that glutamine affects the spread of cancer, but its relationship with the transformation of one type of cancer into another is new and significant data that can help in the development of tests to determine cancer resistance to hormone therapy and, possibly, predict the possibility of transformation in advance.
Article by Mishra et al. Stromal epigenetic alterations drive metabolic and neuroendocrine prostate cancer reprogramming is published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Anastasia Poznyak, portal "Eternal Youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru / based on the materials of Cedars-Sinai University: Hormone Therapy Can Make Prostate Cancer Worse, Study Finds.