
Thoughts Can Fuel Some Deadly Brain Cancers - benbreen
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/04/23/401723235/thoughts-can-fuel-some-deadly-brain-cancers
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benbreen
Here's the journal article this is based on:

Neuronal Activity Promotes Glioma Growth through Neuroligin-3 Secretion

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867415...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867415004298)

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TheLoneWolfling
This seems obvious in hindsight.

We know that thinking causes physical effects on the brain. (I mean: half of
our (limited) understanding of the brain comes from measuring bloodflow.) So
yeah, of course something that's affected by bloodflow (like, say, cancer)
will be affected by thoughts.

The better question is: is there a strong enough effect from actual thoughts
(as opposed to direct neural stimulation, which is what this paper uses) to
cause the same effect?

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sporkologist
We won't know for several years, so in the meantime we'll all just worriedly
try to reduce our general cognition through natural and artificial means.

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siyer
Stanford's release on this goes into more scientific detail, and has a nice
interview with the senior author in which she discusses the background behind
the work.

[http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/04/brain-tumor-
gr...](http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/04/brain-tumor-growth-
stimulated-by-nerve-activity-in-the-cortex.html)

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littletimmy
It is interesting that meditation, insofar that it (temporarily) seeks to the
rid the brain of any activity, would be a natural antidote to anything like
this.

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PaulHoule
I don't know if this really means what they say it means.

When you aren't "thinking" your brain runs a "default network" that consumes
about 98% as much energy as when you are thinking hard. That is, in terms of
metabolic activity, it makes very little difference if you are "thinking" or
relaxing.

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Flam
The article does not elucidate and I don't have access to the full article,
but is this for any kind of brain activity or a particular kind of thought -
perhaps attached to high stress or anxiety?

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sp332
It just says that cancer cells near "active" brain cells are affected. So it
would depend on where in the brain the cancer is. It also mentions one kind of
cancer, diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, occurs in the brain stem. Since you
kinda use that all the time for stuff like breathing, it might not matter what
kind of "thoughts" you have.

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hackyhacky
Similarly, it is widely known that an effective treatment for lung cancer is
to stop breathing.

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ende
This sounds lile the premise to an Orwellian dystopia: the sugeon general is
now requiring that all Americans stop thinking - for their own medical well
being. Thought Limiters will be surgically grafted starting next thursday.

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agumonkey
What about grief ? A High School friend told me he developed tumor afterwards.
I know first hand how it impacts all your body (including brain), and am
wondering if there could be long term harm.

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tokenadult
The National Public Radio report kindly submitted here to open discussion
reports on the study lead author saying something that can fairly be
summarized by the report title. The report goes on to discuss the methods of
the study, noting "The discovery came from a team of scientists who studied
human glioma tumors implanted in mouse brains. The scientists used a technique
called optogenetics, which uses light to control brain cells, to increase the
activity of cells near the tumors." So this wasn't a human study, and it
wasn't an intervention of asking the mice to think more or less, or to think
differently, but rather an intervention of stimulating certain brain cells.

As the NPR report points out, it's hardly likely that physicians can recommend
that human patients reduce their brain activity to keep their gliomas from
growing, but perhaps a treatment can be teased out of interrupting the signal
that leads from neuron activity to glioma growth. I hope so. I have a close
relative who list a fiancee to a glioma, and that kind of brain cancer is a
very frightful disease.

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jerf
"it's hardly likely that physicians can recommend that human patients reduce
their brain activity to keep their gliomas from growing,"

I have to admit my imagination flashed to an image of somebody wearing a
portable biofeedback rig that buzzed (or perhaps zapped) them every time they
used the target portion of their brain, in an attempt to starve the tumor.

It would make a really fascinating experiment to hook someone up to such a
device, then see whether the brain considers that enough of an aversive
stimulus to move the targeted functionality to another part of the brain, as
if that part of the brain was damaged. No way to get that past the ethics
committees, I'm sure, but interesting.

There's probably an interesting sci-fi story in the crazy home DIY tinker
diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer who just puts together such a rig
anyways with no medical approval... if we don't already have the off-the-shelf
tech to do that today we're pretty darned close. (But I've never really worked
out how to move from "high concept" to "actual plot", despite a few attempts.)

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shasta
> I have to admit my imagination flashed to an image of somebody wearing a
> portable biofeedback rig that buzzed (or perhaps zapped) them every time
> they used the target portion of their brain, in an attempt to starve the
> tumor.

Hopefully the target portion of the brain isn't the part that responds to
being zapped.

~~~
jerf
I imagine there are a lot of very entertaining failure cases, or, at least,
entertaining failure cases as long as they aren't really happening to someone.

Heh, perhaps that's the proper angle for the story... macabre comedy. Think
Doc Brown meeting Marty McFly in the past for the first time
([http://eol_images/Entire_Site/2012220/DocBrown.jpg](http://eol_images/Entire_Site/2012220/DocBrown.jpg)
) meets existential pratfalls. We laugh, we learn, we question the fundamental
nature of the relationship between brain and mind.

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swayvil
I know that obsessing about money can alter the physical shape of your brain,
I guess this is the next obvious step.

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thomyorkie
I wonder if meditative activities that promote lower frequency brain waves
would be useful here.

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hnal943
I lost the game

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CletusTSJY
Now I understand why cannabis is a growing treatment for DIPG.

