Doctors eye gut health as part of cancer probe
“There’s no question we’re missing something,” said Dr. Marwan Fakih, a gastrointestinal oncologist at City of Hope in Duarte, Calif., while lamenting about a cancer mystery that is confounding doctors and other medical researchers.
Fakih’s comment was included in an article in the Jan. 4-5 edition of the Wall Street Journal — an article headlined “Focus on young people’s cancer turns to gut.”
According to the Journal’s article, cancer rates have fallen for older adults in recent years, but gastrointestinal cancers, across the world, are increasing among people under 50.
The Journal article said colorectal cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in men under 50 and second for women, behind breast cancer.
Basically, what the medical research community has been asking is “Why?”
Perhaps researchers are on the right track toward answering that question but, as yet, that is not conclusive. Younger generations must be reminded of that and pay attention.
Beyond what the Jan. 4-5 headline divulges, the first paragraph of the article sums up where researchers currently are centering their attention: the gut.
“They are searching people’s bodies and childhood histories for culprits,” the paragraph reports.
Offering a similar viewpoint in the same Journal article was Dr. Jordan Kharofa, a gastrointestinal-cancer specialist at the University of Cincinnati Cancer Center.
“There’s an interplay most likely between the things we eat, the bacteria in the gut, and what those bacteria produce,” he said.
According to the Journal’s report, Kharofa and other researchers have found links to diets high in sulfur, what results from consuming much liquor and processed meat and few fruits and vegetables.
“Gut bacteria can turn that sulfur into hydrogen sulfide, which could inflame the colon and raise cancer risk,” the Journal said.
However, that reportedly isn’t true for everyone, and City of Hope’s Fakih described the situation this way:
“They are very, very health conscious, and then they come into your clinic and they’re 33 and they’ve got stage-four colon cancer.”
Cases like those are what convince Fakih that something important is being missed in the effort to unlock the elusive facts and verifiable conclusions he and others are seeking.
But here’s one interesting — albeit puzzling — finding that has emerged from tracking the mystery over a span of decades. It is that each generation born since the 1950s has had a higher risk than the generation before it, and that could indicate numerous reasons why.
“Everything you can think of that has been introduced in our society since really the 1960s, the post-World War II era, is a potential culprit,” said Dr. Marios Giannakis, a gastrointestinal oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
Meanwhile, data gleaned from study over such long term, involving changing personal habits, changing environmental conditions, changing eating and drinking habits, along with changing life pressures, can, when combined, rule out some suppositions and provide a basis for examining others.
While “not there yet” in terms of unraveling the mystery or mysteries being probed, it probably is safe to say that the paths currently being traversed hold important clues for feeling hopeful, even if not immediately.
“We’re all concerned and want to do something quickly and act quickly, but we want to do so based on sound science,” said Dr. Andrew Chan, director of epidemiology at Mass General Cancer Center in Boston.
The soundness of that thinking can be judged as beyond question.