Virus Found in Prostate Cancer Link
There are some very frightening numbers out there about men’s health. According to National Academy of Sciences, one hundred ninety thousand men have received a diagnosis of prostate cancer this year, in the United States. Twenty seven thousand men will die from prostate cancer, this year. One million men will go through treatment for prostate cancer needlessly. The estimated cost of this treatment is over forty billion dollars a year. This is largely due to the method of testing that is used. These sobering numbers can give men pause. There are now new numbers that are giving men hope.
Ila Singh, an associate pathology professor at the University of Utah, has discovered that the XMRV virus was present in forty-four percent of tumors that received a nine on the ten point Gleason severity scale. This scale measures the aggressiveness of prostate cancers, with ten being the highest and one being a normal prostate. This provides a significant indicator for the most aggressive of prostate cancers. This allows doctors to target patients that have a higher risk of prostate cancer for surgery, due to the presence of the XMRV virus.
The XMVR is a retrovirus. This means that it gets incorporated into the DNA of the cell and may trigger cancer by locating in the portion of the cell’s DNA strand that controls replication. This would cause an uncontrolled cell growth, with each new cell having the same flawed replication DNA strand.
Singh and others at the University, have developed methods to test for the XMRV virus. Singh used a testing group of three hundred thirty-four prostate samples, two hundred thirty-three known be cancerous and one hundred and one with benign enlargement. Twenty-three percent of the cancerous samples tested positive for the XMRV, while only four percent of the non-cancerous samples contained the virus. Prostate samples that where the highest on the Gleason severity scale were more likely contain the virus as well.
The discoveries of the XMVR virus and its relationship to prostate cancer, are giving men hope that they can be detected earlier, and more accurately than ever before.
The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
There are more than fifty studies showing that antidepressants have remarkable anticancer properties. The incrimination of a retrovirus in aggressive prostate cancer strenghtens the paradigm shift, as antidepressants have clinically relevant, immunostimulating and antimicrobial properties.