When natural health advocates warn against mainstream medicine's arsenal of weapons used to fight cancer, including chemotherapy and radiation, their concerns often revolve around how these therapies can weaken and damage a person's body in numerous ways. But scientists are finding other reasons to question some of these therapies. It turns out that while chemotherapies may kill or shrink tumors in the short term, they may actually be causing malignancies to grow more deadly in the long term.
For example,NaturalNewspreviously reported (http://www.naturalnews.com/029042_cancer_cells_chemotherapy.html) that scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Comprehensive Cancer Center and UAB Department of Chemistry are currently investigating the very real possibility that dead cancer cells left over after chemotherapy spark cancer to spread to other parts of the body (metastasis). And now comes news that a little-explored specific cell type, the pericyte, found in what is called themicroenvironmentof a cancerous tumor actually may halt cancer progression and metastasis. And by destroying these cells, some anti-cancer therapies may inadvertently be making cancer more aggressive as well as likely to spread and kill.
A study just published in the January 17 issue of the journalCancer Cellconcludes that anti-angiogenic therapies (which shrink cancer by cutting off tumors' blood supply) may be killing the body's natural defense against cancer by destroying pericyte cells that likely serve as important gatekeepers against cancer progression and metastasis. Pericytes cover blood vessels and support their growth.
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