Good News in the News


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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220605130358.htm

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2201445

A cancer study was done on a small batch of patients with a new cancer treatment drug.  For the first time in the history of cancer research 100% of the subjects were cancer free by the end of the study.  It is only the preliminary trial with only 18 test subjects.  But even with such a small sample size, there has never been a 100% success rate in history.  

The researchers are not ready to say this is a sure thing.  But expectations are high when you get such a result.

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An apartment building in Taiwan was constructed using steel contaminated with a small amount of cobalt-60, a highly dangerous radioactive isotope of cobalt.  The mistake was not discovered until decades later, when the apartment building was being torn down.

Scientists immediately started an epidemiological study of the people who had lived in that apartment building. To their shock, they found that the cancer rates for those who had lived in the apartment building were vastly lower than in the population at large. This was completely at odds with the common understanding that any ionizing radiation was harmful to life. This effect was eventually explained by the so-called radiation hormesis model, which proposes that the damage done to organisms exposed to several times, or perhaps even several hundred times, the normal background radiation triggers an activation of cellular repair mechanisms that end up healing otherwise undetected cell damage.

The point is: Our models of how cancers grow and how our bodies respond to those cancers are so crude that they can be useless for prediction. So a cancer cure can appear out of left field and can take a long time to explain. Such is the nature of biology.

Edited by Vort
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40 minutes ago, Vort said:

This effect was eventually explained by the so-called radiation hormesis model, which proposes that the damage done to organisms exposed to several times, or perhaps even several hundred times, the normal background radiation triggers an activation of cellular repair mechanisms that end up healing otherwise undetected cell damage.

Interesting. I also recently read a study which showed that only light or medium smokers became part of the statistic of lung cancer rates in smokers.  Heavy smokers experienced something similar to what you described here.   I don't remember the details or the exact numbers.  But it was something along the lines that you described.

The thing they didn't mention in the article I wrote was that they were still highly subject to other effects of smoking like emphysema and black lung disease.

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