Disappeared on its own: amazing cases of cancer healings - ForumDaily
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Disappeared on its own: amazing cases of cancer healings

Everyone knows that cancer is a very serious disease that can be treated, but usually it takes a long time and is painful. But there have been cases in history that greatly surprised doctors. People were suddenly cured of cancer on their own. Edition with the BBC decided to figure out how this is possible, and what contributed to it.

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This incident puzzled everyone who had anything to do with it. A 74-year-old woman was bothered by a skin rash that would not go away. When she finally got to the hospital, the lower half of her right leg was covered in raised bumps and a bright red-purple rash. Tests confirmed the worst suspicions: the woman was diagnosed with carcinoma, a form of skin cancer.

The forecasts were disappointing. Given the spread of the tumor, radiotherapy would have been ineffective, and the doctors could not remove the inflammation from the skin. The best solution seemed to be amputation, says the patient's physician Alan Irvine of St. James in Dublin. However, a woman's advanced age would hardly allow her to normally adapt to a prosthesis.

After a long and frank discussion, the doctors decided to wait until the best option was chosen.

“We struggled for a long time with what we could do,” explains Irvine.

And then a miracle happened. Although the patient was not treated in any way, the tumors began to shrink before our eyes.

“We monitored her for several months, and the carcinoma simply disappeared,” the doctor stated: after 20 weeks she was no longer cancerous. “There could be no mistake in the diagnosis.” However, neither the biopsy nor the tomography showed any trace of carcinoma.”

How was a woman cured of one of the worst diseases of our day?

“Everyone was happy, but they were also surprised,” says doctor Irvine. “This means that the body can get rid of cancer on its own, even if such cases are extremely rare.”

The question is: how did this happen? Patient Irvine believed that divine intervention helped: she kissed a religious shrine before the healing process began. However, scientists are interested in a biological explanation for the so-called “spontaneous regression” of the disease. This could make cancer cures more common.

“If you teach the body to do these things, this technique can have very wide applications,” says Irvine.

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In theory, our immune system should detect and destroy cells that have mutated, thus preventing the development of cancer. However, sometimes malignant cells manage to go unnoticed, they begin to multiply and lead to the appearance of a tumor.

At the time when a patient usually goes to doctors, he can no longer heal on his own: according to statistics, only one in 100 cancer patients gets rid of the disease without the help of medicine.

Strange disappearance

But even among such exceptional cases, there are also quite incredible ones. Recently, doctors in a British hospital reported a history of a patient who had suffered from infertility for a long time.

After a while, she was found to have a tumor between the rectum and the uterus, but before she had time to undergo surgery, the woman became pregnant. Everything went well and the patient had a healthy baby. The survey revealed that the cancer mysteriously disappeared during pregnancy. Nine years later, no signs of relapse have been observed.

There are no less impressive recovery histories now recorded in patients with various types of cancer, in particular such aggressive forms as acute myeloid leukemia, during which abnormal multiplication of white blood cells occurs.

"If a patient is left untreated, they usually die within weeks, sometimes days," explains Armin Rashidi of Washington University in St. Louis. However, the scientist was able to find 46 cases where acute myeloid leukemia receded on its own. True, only in eight of them was it possible to avoid further relapse.

“Ask any oncologist if this is possible and 99% will say no,” says Professor Rashidi, who published a study on the topic with colleague Stephen Fisher.

An agonizing wait

At the same time, cases of radical cure for a childhood form of cancer - neuroblastoma - occur surprisingly often, which gives scientists the opportunity to calculate the reasons for spontaneous remission. This type of cancer is characterized by tumors in the nervous system and endocrine glands. If it then spreads (metastasizes), nodules may appear on the skin and tumors may appear in the liver. A tumor in the abdomen makes it difficult for the child to breathe.

Neuroblastoma is an extremely serious disease, but sometimes it disappears as quickly as it appeared, even without medical intervention. Moreover, in children under one year of age, regression is so common that doctors usually do not start chemotherapy right away in the hope that the tumor will resolve on its own.

“I remember three cases where there were significant metastases on the baby’s skin and the liver was enlarged, but we simply observed the patient and he recovered on his own,” says Garrett Broder from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

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But the decision to do nothing and watch is a very difficult one: while avoiding painful treatment brings relief to some parents, others find inaction and helplessness extremely difficult. To avoid this unbearable period, Dr. Broder strives to understand the reason for the disappearance of cancer.

“We want to develop a drug that can trigger the regression mechanism, and we will no longer have to wait for mercy from nature,” he explains.

Keys to Understanding

Garrett Brodeur has already identified several important leads. For example, unlike other nerve cells, neuroblastoma tumor cells appear to have learned to survive in the absence of something called nerve growth factor (NGF), a small protein that stimulates neuron development.

Spontaneous remission can be caused by natural changes in neuroblastoma tumor cells, and it is possible that cellular receptors that NGF binds to are involved in this process. Whatever the changes, this may mean that cells cannot continue to exist without an essential nutrient for them.

In this case, a drug that will directly affect the receptors could promote recovery. The two pharmaceutical companies have already invented several potential options, Broder said, and he hopes clinical trials will begin soon.

“This drug will be able to selectively destroy tumor cells that are sensitive to this metabolic pathway, without patients having to undergo chemotherapy, radiation or surgery,” he said. “And also suffer severe side effects from chemotherapy.”

Friendly fire

Unfortunately, cases of unexpected cures from other forms of cancer are less well understood. Perhaps because they are very rare. However, some clues still exist. Their emergence was facilitated by the pioneering work of a little-known American doctor more than a hundred years ago.

In the late XNUMXth century, William Bradley Cowley tried to save a patient who was found to have a large tumor in his neck. Five surgeries performed did not cure the cancer. The man then contracted an unpleasant skin infection that was accompanied by a fever. However, when he recovered from the infection, the tumor disappeared.

Dr. Cowley decided to test this principle on a small group of patients and found that inoperable tumors dissolve if the patient is deliberately infected with bacteria or treated with toxic waste products.

Can infection stimulate spontaneous remission in other cases as well? Analysis of recent data clearly supports further investigation of this issue. For example, research by Rashidi and Fisher showed that 90% of patients who recovered from leukemia, shortly before the disappearance of cancer, suffered another disease, such as pneumonia.

Other studies note that tumors receded after patients suffered from diphtheria, gonorrhea, hepatitis, influenza, malaria, measles, smallpox, and syphilis. Indeed, what does not kill us makes us stronger.

The microbes themselves are not the cause of the treatment. The infection is thought to trigger an immune response that is unfavorable for the existence of the tumor. For example, high temperatures can make tumor cells more vulnerable and cause them to "suicide."

Or, an important role is played by the fact that when our body is fighting bacteria and viruses, many inflammatory molecules appear in our blood, which activate macrophage cells, and these immune cells become warriors, and potentially absorb not only microbes, but also cancer.

“I think the infection causes the body's immune cells to stop promoting the development of tumor cells and start destroying them,” says Henrik Schmidt from Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark. This, in turn, may also stimulate other components of the immune system, such as dendritic cells and T cells.

According to Schmidt, understanding the process of spontaneous remission is necessary for the development of new immunotherapy techniques that will use the body's natural defense system to fight cancer. For example, one treatment involves injecting inflammatory “cytokines” to kickstart the immune system. Side effects - high fever and other flu-like symptoms - are usually treated with medications such as paracetamol, which relieve the patient's condition.

However, since fever itself can induce remission, Schmidt suggests that paracetamol may reduce the effectiveness of the technique. Indeed, the scientist found that twice as many patients (25% compared to 10%) were able to survive the two-year period if they did not knock their temperature down.

These findings could lead to other simple but effective ways to fight cancer. One person experienced spontaneous remission after being vaccinated against tetanus and diphtheria, perhaps because the vaccines boost the immune system. Based on this, Rashidi notes that standard booster vaccinations, such as BCG, appear to reduce the likelihood of melanoma recurrence after chemotherapy.

"Pick up" the treatment

Other researchers advocate more radical methods. For example, proponents of one approach suggest deliberately infecting cancer patients with tropical diseases.

The method, developed by the American startup PrimeVax, involves a fight in two directions at once. First, a sample is taken from the patient's tumor, and dendritic cells, which are responsible for the immune response to the threat, are removed from the blood.

By exposing them to tumor cells in the laboratory, you can program them to recognize cancer cells. At the same time, the patient is infected with dengue fever, after which he is given an injection of "programmed" dendritic cells.

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Under the supervision of doctors, the patient's temperature rises to 40,5 degrees, which is why many inflammatory molecules are released into the blood. As a result, the body's immune system begins to work at full capacity.

The tumor, which previously went unnoticed, becomes a target for the attack of immune cells, which are controlled by programmed dendritic cells.

“Dengue invades the body and reformats the immune system so that it begins to destroy tumor cells,” says Bruce Lyday, an employee of PrimeVax.

Infecting weakened patients with dengue fever is a risky move. However, an adult is no more likely to die from dengue fever than from a common cold, and is therefore the safest of all possible infections. It is also very important that when the temperature subsides, programmed immune cells continue to closely monitor malignant cells if they suddenly appear again.

“Cancer is a moving target. Most treatment methods are aimed at the disease only from one side, but we are trying to put it once and for all in an obviously losing position,” notes Bruce Lyday.

The pioneering cancer treatment is undoubtedly extremely ambitious.

“Our goal is to reproduce spontaneous remission as naturally as possible,” explains Lyday’s colleague Tony Chen.

However, PrimeVax employees emphasize that their idea is still at an early stage of development and, until clinical trials begin, they do not know how things will turn out.

The researchers hope that patients with advanced melanoma will be the first to test the technique.

Obviously, we need to proceed with caution. As Alan Irvine points out, “spontaneous remission is just a tiny clue in a huge, complex puzzle.” But if scientists still manage to win, the consequences of their work will be colossal. A quick and relatively painless cure for cancer is now considered a miracle. But with this method, it could become the new normal.

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