Quantcast
ZME Science
  • News
  • Environment
  • Health
  • Future
  • Space
  • Features
  • More
    • About
    • The Team
    • Advertise
    • Contribute
    • Our stance on climate change
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact
No Result
View All Result
ZME Science

No Result
View All Result
ZME Science
No Result
View All Result
Home Health & Medicine Diseases

Fat mice may help solve obesity-colon cancer puzzle

Scientists have known for quite a while that obesity increases the chances of colon cancer, but hey were unable to figure out why.

Mihai Andrei by Mihai Andrei
March 4, 2016
in Diseases, Health & Medicine, News
Reading Time: 2 mins read
A A
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterSubmit to Reddit

Scientists have known for quite a while that obesity increases the chances of colon cancer, but hey were unable to figure out why. Now, they might have the answer.

Lab mouse. Photo by Rama.

Obese mice, just like obese humans, are at an increased risk of colon cancer. Researchers found that overweight mice showed an increasein intestinal stem cells due to activation of a protein called PPAR-δ that regulates metabolism. If the same stands for humans, this could help explain a medical mystery:

“For quite some time there’s been an understanding that obesity leads to an increase in cancer in many tissues,” says Ömer Yilmaz, a cancer biologist at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, and one of the leaders of the study. “We really wanted to understand the mechanism behind this.”

Yilmaz teamed up with David Sabatini, who studies metabolism at MIT to find out more about the connection between cancer and obesity. They fed mice a high-fat, high-calorie diet for a year and then tested the effects of the diet on the number and function of stem cells in their intestines.

ADVERTISEMENT

They found that the 60% fat diet not only made mice become overweight, but also activated PPAR-δ and stimulated the proliferation of intestinal stem cells. This rise in stem cells was consistently associated with a rise in tumors.

Sorry to interrupt, but you should really...

...Join the ZME newsletter for amazing science news, features, and exclusive scoops. More than 40,000 subscribers can't be wrong.

   

However, what isn’t clear is if this rise in tumors is caused by the mice becoming overweight or by the fatty foods directly. Also, while the relationship seems very similar to what has been reported in humans, this may not necessarily be the case. We could be dealing with “a mechanism in search of a relation that doesn’t exist in humans”, cautions Walter Willett, who studies nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. Yilmaz also remarks that epidemiological studies like this one can be muddled by confounding variables.

”The data linking fat intake to cancer incidence is a mixed bag,” he says.

He and his team now want to isolate individual factors and pinpoint the decisive factor that links obesity to colon cancer.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2016.19484

ShareTweetShare
Mihai Andrei

Mihai Andrei

Andrei's background is in geophysics, and he's been fascinated by it ever since he was a child. Feeling that there is a gap between scientists and the general audience, he started ZME Science -- and the results are what you see today.

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
  • News
  • Environment
  • Health
  • Future
  • Space
  • Features
  • More

© 2007-2019 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science. All Rights Reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • News
  • Environment
  • Health
  • Future
  • Space
  • Features
  • More
    • About
    • The Team
    • Advertise
    • Contribute
    • Our stance on climate change
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact

© 2007-2019 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science. All Rights Reserved.