Washington : If you are overweight, you may want to shed those extra kilos as a recent study has found that the aggressive breast cancer grows faster in an obese environment.
‘It’s not just what’s inside breast cancer cells that matters, it’s also the environment surrounding cancer cells that drives the disease, according to the researchers at the University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.
In an abstract that will be presented at the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2017, researchers will report their preliminary findings that cancer cells grew faster when they were transplanted into fatty, obese tissue.
They believe the study can help explain the obesity cancer link, providing evidence that elements of the fatty tissue surrounding cancer cells may help the cancer to grow. “We’re interested in something called the ‘microenvironment,’ which is basically cells around the tumours and the chemicals those cells produce,” said researcher Liza Makowski.
Researchers studied a type of breast cancer known as triple-negative breast cancer. Researchers transplanted and grew triple negative breast cancer cells from lean laboratory models into models of obese, lean and formerly obese microenvironments to observe how tumours grew in these different contexts. When they analysed the gene expression patterns occurring within the tumours themselves, they found that the alterations that occurred were “extremely subtle”. –ANI
