Hacker News Reader

Comment by noname120 | Hacker News Reader

The title of the paper is strongly misleading. Here is the whole basis of the article:

> Shortly after diagnosis he was admitted with breathlessness and wheeze and was diagnosed with PCR‐positive SARS‐CoV‐2

> Four months later, palpable lymphadenopathy had reduced and an interim PET/CT scan revealed widespread resolution of the lymphadenopathy and reduced metabolic uptake throughout

And the claim:

> We hypothesise that the SARS‐CoV‐2 infection triggered an anti‐tumour immune response

There are spontaneous remissions everywhere without identified causes. It's jumping to conclusions to assume that it was thanks to SARS-CoV-2 in that case.

View on HN

You didn't quote the entire sentence:

"We hypothesise that the SARS‐CoV‐2 infection triggered an anti‐tumour immune response, as has been described with other infections in the context of high‐grade non‐Hodgkin lymphoma."

That suggests this has happened before and is not specific to this particular virus. Seems like an odd omission when you're after "the whole basis of the article".

Still, it sounds like "the engine started running again after I hit it with a wrench, which I knew can sometimes be effective".

It’d be pretty useless to only research and document phenomena that you already understand. But in case it seems that odd to you, here’s 16 other cases of cancer that went into remission after a viral infection:

https://clinmedjournals.org/articles/ijccr/international-jou...

My intention was to narrow my quotes around the elements that illustrated my point. I didn't mean to misrepresent what they were saying, thanks for stepping up and providing more context.

In spite of this, I still believe that the title is strongly misleading.

That made me try to find the remission rate of Hodgkins Lymphoma, and according to this 2005 paper [0] it is indeed very rare, the paper says that only 15 cases have been recorded. The interesting part: The patient in that paper had "complete remission during intensified care for interstitial pneumonia".

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2815821/

If I recall correctly, viral infections can cause remission of cancer. It somehow redirects the immune system to cancer cells.

In other cases, viral infections infect and kill cancer cells.

Fever may be an important factor. IIRC statistically people who had one severe fever in their life, have a lower incidence of cancer.

I think the double edged blade here is not the anti-viral response, but autoimmune reactions, which are excerbrated by tissue destruction and an overall activated immune system.

Cancer needs to gain immune cloaking and a viral infection may present the misbehaving cells by chance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com