Radiotherapy may explain why childhood cancer survivors often develop metabolic disease (fat cells go bad)

Medical XPress / Rockefeller University / JCI Insight ^ | Nov. 9, 2021 | Xiaojing Huang et al

[ConservativeMind]

Decades after battling childhood cancer, survivors often face a new challenge: cardiometabolic disease. A spectrum of conditions that includes coronary heart disease and diabetes, cardiometabolic disease typically impacts people who are obese, elderly, or insulin resistant.

Radiation therapy may be to blame. The findings suggest that it may be necessary to find strategies that reduce the radiation dose delivered to fat.

"When physicians are planning radiation therapy, they are very conscious of toxicity to major organs. But fat is often not considered," says Rockefeller's Paul Cohen.

Children with cancer are more likely to survive into adulthood than ever before. More than 80 percent of cancer patients under the age of 18 are still alive one year after an initial diagnosis. But their life expectancies remain stubbornly low, largely because many survivors go on to develop cardiometabolic disease. Studies suggest that, among those treated with radiation therapy, the risk of cardiac death is seven times higher than that of the general population.

…The volunteers were otherwise at low risk of metabolic disease, with normal BMIs and waist-to-hip ratios. Yet the data indicated their fat tissue was brimming with immune cells known as macrophages and contained several proteins involved in the body's response to chronic injury. This sort of molecular profile is what Cohen expected to find among elderly, obese patients, not healthy, young cancer survivors who had received clean bills of health years ago. And their bodies were already displaying the subtle indicators of brewing metabolic disease, such as rising blood sugar.

"We specifically selected younger people with normal BMI, and yet the signature that we found matches that of people who were much older and obese," Cohen says. "Radiation has been said to induce premature aging, and that's consistent with what we saw here."

[ConservativeMind]

It may be worth talking with your doctor concerning the best possible approach to addressing childhood cancer treatment.

[nagant]

It’s well proven that cancer is a metabolic shutdown. Cancer is a cellular transformation of energy from performing specific necessary tasks to the creation of useless cancer tissue.

Metabolic syndrome is more of the same energy shutdown. That said, what evidence do these researchers think they have that this post-cancer metabolic syndrome is not just a continuation of the metabolic syndrome which produced the cancer?

[Skywise]

I’m not sure you can blame this on the “fat cells” per se.
Even if you’re just targeting specific areas with radiation you’ve still got blood moving through the area. I’d posit the radiated blood is affecting the liver, kidneys or pancreas which affects the metabolic profile of the fat.

Still no superpowers though...

[ifinnegan]

There’s never a panacea.

DEARE, delayed effect of acute radiation exposure. It’s a real thing.

[entropy12]

Nailed it! For openers, cancer is a symptom of the body having lost the ability to identify cancer cells as foreign. The body happily provides extra blood vessels to the cancer cells so they can grow faster.

That is why there is no “cure” for cancer, and there never will be. Only thing which can be done is excise or radiate the existing cancer cells and put the patient in remission. But new cancer cells will form on and on. Cancer always wins in the end.