Thoughts Can Fuel Some Deadly Brain Cancers | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts Can Fuel Some Deadly Brain Cancers

npr.org

88 pointsbenbreen22 comments

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...

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?

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.

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...

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.

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.

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?

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.

The abstract says:

> The synaptic protein neuroligin-3 (NLGN3) was identified as the leading candidate mitogen, and soluble NLGN3 was sufficient and necessary to promote robust HGG cell proliferation. NLGN3 induced PI3K-mTOR pathway activity and feedforward expression of NLGN3 in glioma cells.

So unless high stress/anxiety lead to increased production of NLGN3...

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

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.

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.

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.

"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.)

> 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.

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 ) meets existential pratfalls. We laugh, we learn, we question the fundamental nature of the relationship between brain and mind.

Kind of the stuff of science fiction but...I can imagine that if we could put someone in a medical induced coma for a long-period of time, sort of like suspended animation, we could perhaps find ways to treat the cancer while the brain is inactive or at least limit the tumor growth until a more viable treatment is available at a future date.

Art predicts life, perhaps?

"Just a heads-up: That coffee we gave you earlier had fluorescent calcium in it so we can track the neuronal activity in your brain. There's a slight chance the calcium could harden and vitrify your frontal lobe. Anyway, don't stress yourself thinking about it. I'm serious. Visualizing the scenario under stress actually triggers the reaction."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/OmH7tAJ0SfA?start=128&end=146

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

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

I lost the game

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

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