Scientists crack how aspirin might stop cancers from spreading
bbc.com
bbc.com
>But the study showed that another part of our blood - the platelets that normally stop bleeding - were suppressing the T-cells and making it harder for them to take out the cancer.
>Aspirin disrupts the platelets and removes their influence over the T-cells so they can hunt out the cancer.
It would be nice if our bodies could adapt to modernity quicker, like don't prioritize blood clotting over immune defenses, I can just get some more band-aids on the off chance I cut myself in our very safe world. Don't preserve calories in case we are starving in the future, just build muscles and heal injuries recklessly I can hit up the grocery store if we need more nutrients.
There's plenty of research showing that brain development and food preparation went hand in hand (cooking allows humans to liberate more calories from food with the same sized gut, allowing us both to be pretty mobile and have more energy available to run our large and energy-hungry brains).
If you look at the way guts are built, clearly nature/evolution is trying to pack as much intestine as possible into a limited space.
Certainly increasing calorie availability beyond a certain point isn't a good thing - our brains can't burn more than a certain amount, and most of us, Michael Phelps excepted, don't like making our bodies do the same - but I wonder to what extent our design-constraints put limits on our ability to absorb non-calorie nutrients.
On the one hand you have a supplement industry who will say anything to make a buck, and are infected with pseudoscience and woo, but on the other, the standard med-sci advice of "just eat a balance diet, it's impossible to improve on that" seems kind of glib and baseless.
The problem is also that if you "adapt fast" to "recklessness", then many people die fast before they would not be able to adapt back if necessary.
Got wounded in a conflict zone cut off from supplies for months? Too bad, coz your body adapted to grocery store being close and unfortunately your body decided to just never put on weight in the first place, so now you have zero reserves to use up and ... you die.
Watch "Alone". Some of the guys are adapted to never put on much weight and that's a real problem for them. They have a TV show safety net. If it was real, they'd be dead.
Asking because "my bow guy" from Youtube, that I learned bow making from was the winner of Alone season 8 and he's one of the guys that can't put on weight. He tried i.e. put on as much as he could but he knew he had a disadvantage against everyone else because he'd not just go in fat like most others.
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Clay Hayes if you want to google his channel. Does survival stuff, bow making and bow hunting / trad bow.
He won, because he knows his stuff, so while the guys that had just put on weight had a weight advantage, he had a knowledge and "actually knows how to survive off the land and has nothing to prove" attitude. While some others had their bow strings chewed up by mice, he immediately hung his bow up. Unlike others that built elaborate shelters and used up all their calories, he built a very simple a-frame hut that he knew how to build. Even though he had no proper clay he built a proper tiny oven to keep himself warm and smoke free inside. He had absolutely super bad luck with fishing. Essentially got nothing for lots of effort.
He was super lucky in that he actually found a deer and was able to shoot is with his trad bow, which is because he goes deer/elk hunting for real every single year with exactly that setup (see his youtube channel). He knew how to preserve said meat by smoking it and he knew how to protect it from the bear(s) in the area, which they weren't allowed to kill because this was filmed in BC Canada. He even had a super close encounter towards the end IIRC with a cougar but might have been the bear, not sure any more (not around his meat but out and about).
He almost gave up. Basically he wanted to give up at the next med-checkin because he essentially had no food but the smoked deer and they told him he won!
I also remember not liking how restricted each person was - they were plopped on a plot of land and couldn't roam or move if they got unlucky. Also in that they were limited in what they could hunt / survive on. Its been awhile though so might be a bit murky.
I believe we are still evolving, but at least for now, in this brief period, our most significant "evolution" has been our ability to extend life and enhance its comfort—whether by tweaking bodily mechanisms or treating diseases. I hope that gene editing will be our next step in evolution, allowing us to take control of our biological limitations in ways we never could before.
It's still constant change, but now it's a random walk where all directions are just about as good, so no mutation has a significant edge on survival, so the little changes tend to cancel each other out.
https://raypeat.com/articles/aging/aspirin-brain-cancer.shtm...
Some of Dr. Peat's disciples have even begun their own independent cancer research (in mice) trying to prove efficacy of far more basic interventions:
https://x.com/haidut/status/1751716166387597730
I've been an observer of this sphere since ~2017, have implemented various Peat-related concepts towards my own health and fitness, to overall positive results. What's interesting is seeing more and more of these theories - under the theme of 'bioenergetics' - starting to be proven out even in conventional research.
Edit: Some people are getting angry (and in some cases, deleting their comments). Let me be clearer: I have no idea who Ray Peat is. The OP commented that Peat is a "quack" and I was just asking why, because they didn't provide any supporting documentation.
Oddly enough, I just now discovered that I used to live down the street from Peat, before he passed away. I don't recall ever meeting him, though.
Avocados
Peat claimed that avocados are carcinogenic because they contain a lot of unsaturated fat.[8] Like all the other nonsense he spouted, he failed to back up this ridiculous claim with any scientific evidence.
Orange juice
Peat was a big fan of orange juice which he said is "anti-estrogenic".[41] He also claimed that orange juice is good because it raises people's cholesterol.[42] There is not any evidence in the medical literature that shows orange juice consumption raises cholesterol. Studies have found the opposite, as it lows LDL-c and total cholesterol.[43][44] A 2022 review of clinical trials found that orange juice significantly reduces circulating total cholesterol levels.[45] Everything Peat said about foods should be fact-checked because in most cases he was entirely wrong in what he had claimed.
Guess it’s why it takes half the population forever to still be “doing their research”
"He made many other ridiculous claims such as avocados causing cancer.[8]" https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ray_Peat#cite_ref-Vegetables_8...
Link [8]: "Vegetables". raypeat.com. Goes to: https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/vegetables.shtml
The quote in question: "Not all fruits, of course, are perfectly safe--avocados, for example, contain so much unsaturated fat that they can be carcinogenic and hepatotoxic."
Note that phrasing "can be", "Not... perfectly safe.". Also btw, did you know that carrots "can be" hepatotoxic (toxic to the liver) because of all the vitamin A? This doesn't mean that carrots are bad, but rather that they shouldn't be an excessively large part of one's daily diet. They are not "perfectly safe".
Let's examine how Peat came to this idea based on the research. Remember, the actual claim is that "avocados.. can be carcinogenic and hepatotixic." Not that avocados cause cancer. That is not what he wrote. That wiki article has a clear bias.
Anyways, his research for the actual claim:
"In Vivo 1998 Nov-Dec;12(6):675-89. Comparative anticancer effects of vaccination and dietary factors on experimentally-induced cancers. ... Experiments in mammary glands cancer showed that a 15% olive-oil diet reduced significantly the tumor incidence caused by 9,10-dimethyl-1,2-benzanthracene. The antitumor effect of the olive-oil diet was connected to its content of monounsaturated fatty acids, such as oleic and palmitic acids. The promotive tumorigenic effects of other high-fat diets (avocado, soybeans) were associated with high content of some polyunsaturated fatty acids (linoleic and alpha-linolenic). Different diets have different targets. The effect of the same diet depends on its anti-tumor substances content. CONCLUSIONS: Vaccination and some diets have similar mechanism in their tumor-preventive effects."
"Ann Nutr Metab 1991;35(5):253-60. Effect of dietary avocado oils on hepatic collagen metabolism. Wermam MJ, Mokady S, Neeman I Department of Food Engineering and Biotechnology, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. The effect of various avocado and soybean oils on collagen metabolism in the liver was studied in growing female rats for 8 weeks and in day-old chicks for 1 week. In comparison with rats fed either refined avocado oil, refined or unrefined soybean oils, rats fed unrefined avocado oil showed a significant decrease in total collagen solubility in the liver, while there were no changes in total collagen, protein and moisture content. Chicks fed unrefined avocado oil as compared to those fed refined avocado oil also showed a decrease in hepatic total soluble collagen while hepatic total collagen remained unaffected. Electron micrographs and light-microscope examinations of rats' liver revealed collagen accumulation in the periportal location. This is suggestive of the early stages of fibrosis."
All he did was link real-world research to a possible hypothesis. A logical argument. Now you can criticize this argument and say that we can't draw any such conclusions from in vivo and animal model experiments, but at least then you'd be actually engaging with the content of the ideas, not outsourcing your thinking to a poorly-written Wiki article.
"avocados, for example, contain so much unsaturated fat that they can be carcinogenic and hepatotoxic" is exactly what he says in the article text. That explicitly read as "consumption of avocados can cause cancer", not the much weaker claim "it's possible that there's a mechanism by which avocados might cause cancer or be hepatotoxic but we don't actually know", which is what you actually get if you look at those reference.
Even the quotes he chooses are mismatched to what he says in the text. The liver one is about dietary avocado oils specifically, not avocados generally, and has the weakest possible conclusion that the chicks have something "suggestive of early stages of fibrosis" for unrefined but not refined. It's beyond just in vivo and animal model limitations, it: doesn't address dietary avocado consumption and doesn't conclusively show liver toxicity. That this reference is so weak, and yet the one he chose, is itself quite damning.
I'm sure some of his advice has backing to it. A lot of it doesn't. A good amount of it even has a fair body of evidence against the claim (like Alzheimer's can be stopped by using tobacco).
This is classic highlighting hits while ignoring misses. A quack that tells you to exercise and eat 5lbs of raw chicken every day can be right about the exercise, that doesn't mean their raw chicken diet is also valid.
However, nicotine intake through smoking would not be beneficial. Any positive effects would be outweighed by the significant harm caused by the other toxic components in cigarette smoke." https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/about-dementia/managing-the-ri...
They are speaking generically of course, if someone was genetically predisposed, or showed other signs, it could make sense.
He didn't just story-tell about how they might be true like how Peat claims walnuts are carcinogenic due to unsaturated fat and sucrose cures disease and his other crockpot ideas.
When one or two of his ideas happen to sound reasonable, it's the research that should get the epistemic credit, not a guy shotgunning 100 dumb ideas. What about all his claims that go against the evidence like avocados being carcinogenic due to unsaturated fat?
This is a common problem with cult followings. Their followers keep bringing you claims to debunk, they watch them get debunked, and they never stop to ask themself why they are still playing human centipede with the guy shitting these claims into their mouth.
Also, if someone tells lies then even if there is only a small fraction of people who believe them, then the law of large numbers on the internet says that these lies will get amplified.
Can you post the quote/reference for this? At worst I would think he referenced some observational study about smokers - people ingesting significant nicotine - having lowered incidences of Alzheimer's. That wouldn't surprise me in the slightest because we see the same types of studies for things like caffeine.
Mild stimulants and metabolism boosters in particular (energy and metabolism are the core of Peat's theories) are likely associated with protective effects.
So please post specifics from Peat, and be careful to avoid internet broken telephone - a lot of people attribute quotes and ideas to him that he never said nor endorsed.
> People who take aspirin, drink coffee, and use tobacco, have a much lower incidence of Alzheimer’s disease than people who don’t use those things. Caffeine inhibits brain phospholipase, making it neuroprotective in a wide spectrum of conditions. In recent tests, aspirin has been found to prevent the misfolding of the prion protein, and even to reverse the misfolded beta sheet conformation, restoring it to the harmless normal conformation. Nicotine might have a similar effect, preventing deposition of amyloid fibrils and disrupting those already formed (Ono, et al., 2002). Vitamin E, aspirin, progesterone, and nicotine also inhibit phospholipase, which contributes to their antiinflammatory action. Each of the amyloid-forming proteins probably has molecules that interfere with its toxic accumulation.
And yet, if you'd researched it, you'd have found that it's an active area of research, not just for Alzheimer's treatment, but for several types of brain injury.
https://discoveries.vanderbilthealth.com/2019/09/nicotine-to...
https://www.science.org/content/article/nicotine-and-alzheim...
https://www.healthline.com/health/alzheimers-dementia/nicoti...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1670208/ (Nicotine for Alzheimer's)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35138210/ (Nicotine for traumatic brain injury).
It won't be a miracle cure. And of course all of these articles are quick to point out that even if nicotine is potentially beneficial, smoking is still definitely bad for your health, and that's a strong confounding factor.
There's cause for caution and I personally wouldn't start using nicotine or recommending it at this point. But it's not something to dismiss out of hand as "quackery", either. It seems more and more likely that the cure for Alzheimer's won't be a single drug, but rather a combination of several things: lifestyle changes, supplements, and drugs all working together. Nicotine might well play a role in this.
At this point, I think it would be right to call Ray Peat out for overstating the efficacy of an uproven treatment, but unfair to label him as a quack, at least based on this piece of evidence.
That's where the quackery enters. Taking something with a kernel of truth and then expanding it past what the research says into unsafe practices.
This is how a lot of quacks work.
> People who take aspirin, drink coffee, and use tobacco, have a much lower incidence of Alzheimer’s disease than people who don’t use those things.
This is true though.
Tobacco smokers do have a lower incidence of Alzheimer's compared to non-smokers.
This strange fact is what started the research, as noted in several of the links I shared.
Of course, for smokers, it's offset by higher cancer, higher dementia, all kinds of other problems.
> He didn't call for simple nicotine consumption, he called for tobacco use.
Are you sure? I'm not familiar with Ray Peat but I've just spent a few minutes researching and it seems like the man himself never said this, but rather his followers took quotes out of context - like the one you shared - and ran with it.
As far as I can see, he recommends using patches rather than smoking. If I'm wrong, can you find a quote from him (not someone else cherry picking his writing) specifically reccomending smoking?
While the Ethics Panel and solicitors may have ordered the researchers to say that, I'm thinking that anyone with serious cancer should (1) start taking aspirin, (2) read a bit about aspirin side-effects and contra-indications, then (3) let their doctor know that they did (1) and (2).
I am not a doctor. I don't even play one on TV. But if I understand correctly, there are two types of strokes: hemorrhagic strokes (strokes caused by bleeding in the brain) and... I don't know the technical term, but clot-based strokes (a blood clot blocks an artery in the brain). And if I understand correctly, clot-based strokes are something like 80% of strokes - they're four times as likely as hemorrhagic strokes.
So isn't aspirin a net win anyway? You may increase your odds of a hemorrhagic stroke, but decrease your odds of the other kind of stroke, and the other kind is more common. (Unless you have some reason to think that you are more susceptible to hemorrhagic strokes than the other kind.)
Corrections welcome, especially ones with data.
Note well: This is not medical advice. Consult a doctor, not randos on the internet.
And until recently, daily aspirin was recommended for that, even for people with no history of heart disease. But AIUI, now the American Heart Association (2019) [1], U.S. Preventive Service Task Force (2022) [2], and the European Society of Cardiology (2019) [3] all say that for people with no history of cardiovascular disease, daily aspirin has little to no net benefit in younger patients and increases mortality in older patients.
Of course, the possibility of preventing metastasis adds another benefit, and may tip the balance back in favor of aspirin therapy.
1: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000678
2: https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/articles/2022/04/27...
3: https://www.escardio.org/static-file/Escardio/Guidelines/Pub...
All the thinners don't just depend on dose but also on (e.g.) the amount of Vitamin K from leafy greens.
If we survive the next century (looking unlikely...) it's a fair bet that mixing AI analysis with live biochemical tracking and as-required synthesis would be the next Big Thing. Current medications are extremely crude and have hit-and-miss outcomes because the combination of diet, genetics, gender, activity levels, age, and stress (etc) all have huge effects on individual biochemistry.
If the cancer that you already have is (say) 10% likely to kill you, then waiting several years - for researchers to nail down details - is likely far riskier than taking aspirin now.
(No, you can't be an idiot about it. Aspirin at 50g/kg would kill you faster than any cancer could, etc., etc.)
If someone is dumb enough to down 9 lbs of Aspirin, it's on them.
I think it's safe to say if it's recommended for cancerous old folks, it's safe to take for average people.
It's just a matter of dosage.
I'm not sure why you would think that. There are many things we are willing to prescribe to older people because they are unlikely to suffer long-term negative effects.
Random example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10381905/ - Even 10mg/day causes gastric injury/toxicity by removing the nice slime layer in your gut.
Also, once you get specific about which CVD metrics you're trying to optimize, you'll find vastly superior interventions to try.
Is there any evidence that the researchers believe otherwise? Often, people on HN accuse researchers and news of overstating results.
> I'm thinking that anyone with serious cancer should
Why should anyone trust you with treatment for "serious cancer"? Does your advice depend on what kind of cancer? The location in the body? Other factors in the patient's health?
When you're facing a death sentence, something that "works in mice" is preferable to nothing at all.
GP didn't ask that cancer sufferers avoid existing treatment; I read it more as "Aspirin cannot possibly hurt, so you may as well".
It's like buying a lottery ticket - the negative impact of doing so is negligible but the positive impact of winning is life-changing.
Same with aspirin for cancer - the negative impact of doing so is non-existent, but the positive impact is life-changing.
> nothing at all
Who said anything about that?
Is bleeding bad from the butt a life worth living?
Wondering what prep h suppositories would have done for you...
“““ [...]
Irrelevant to Cancer Discussion – In the context of the BBC article about aspirin preventing cancer spread, this comment is only tangentially related. It does not engage with the article’s findings about aspirin's effect on cancer cells and instead focuses on aspirin's formulation and stomach safety, which is a separate discussion. The comment seems to use the article as a springboard for discussing a niche health opinion rather than engaging with the core scientific findings presented.
Overall Characterization: The comment is opinionated, alternative-health-oriented, and off-topic regarding the article's cancer discussion. It reflects a niche perspective influenced by Ray Peat’s followers, prioritizing aspirin’s stomach safety over its potential anti-cancer benefits. While it might offer practical advice for those concerned about aspirin’s side effects, it does not directly contribute to the scientific discussion in the BBC article. ”””
The results are encouraging but in no way conclusive for humans. They open for the opportunity for broader studies, studies in humans. That's all they do.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22440947/
The question was how it works and as far as I know you can't legally yet use genetically engineered humans to suppress a gene, induce cancer and test a theory.
How would you test this theory on human (safely) ?
Select some cancer patients and ask their consent to some novel treatment with Aspirin?
If the scientist went to use genetically modified mice, I assume it's because there is no easier, non invasive test, to analyze the influence of platelets over the T-cell behavior. Like using a microscope or chemicals.
I'm not talking about signing a form but the technical aspect. However if you know how, please share, it would be interesting.
Like, why would the humans need to have a specific generic configuration? Only with some specific genes the T-Cells are affected by platelets? This is not something that happens on every human?
> The discovery, published in the journal Nature, happened by accident as the scientists were not researching aspirin.
> The team in Cambridge were investigating how the immune system responded to cancers when they spread.
> They were using genetically engineered mice and found those lacking a specific set of genetic instructions were less likely to get metastatic cancer that had spread.
From the publication : > Here we show that inhibitors of cyclooxygenase 1 (COX-1), including aspirin, enhance immunity to cancer metastasis by releasing T cells from suppression by platelet-derived thromboxane A2 (TXA2).
Safe to say my assumption was wrong, they didn't use generally modified mouse because they had no other choice but because they were looking for something else.
> This is not something that happens on every human?
It's usually much harder in science to understand and prove the 'how' than it is to check the 'if'. To prove a mechanism you got to be able to track it, for instance by using radioactive product, or use such a way that you refute all other casualties.
I think in that case, it would have been possible to prove the mechanism by using several different inhibitors of cyclooxygenase, checking if the effect on spreading cancer is still there. If yes, it's a good indication of casualties.
Sounds promising, honestly, obviously having to weigh in the risks of using medication that inhibits the action of platelets.
(had to use Google - I only know that there are 7000 grains to the pound)
The grain, in terms of weight, is 64.8 milligrams, or much more than a even a course grain of sand, which it turns out, is somewhere around 1 milligram, ranging from 0.04 mg for fine sand to 4 mg for very course sand, average around 0.3.
"Aspirin is the genericized trademark for acetylsalicylic acid (ASA)"
That's why