June 26th 2012 at 10:00 am by Sayer Ji.
Following on the heels of recent revelations that x-ray mammography may be contributing to an epidemic of future radiation-induced breast cancers, in a new article titled, "Radiation Treatment Generates Therapy Resistant Cancer Stem Cells From Aggressive Breast Cancer Cells," published in the journal Cancer July 1st, 2012, researchers from the Department of Radiation Oncology at the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center report that radiation treatment actually drives breast cancer cells into greater malignancy.
The researchers found that even when radiation kills half of the tumor cells treated, the surviving cells which are resistant to treatment, known as induced breast cancer stem cells (iBCSCs), were up to 30 times more likely to form tumors than the nonirradiated breast cancer cells. In other words, the radiation treatment regresses the total population of cancer cells, generating the false appearance that the treatment is working, but actually increases the ratio of highly malignant to benign cells within that tumor, eventually leading to the iatrogenic (treatment-induced) death of the patient.
Last month, a related study published in the journal Stem Cells titled, "Radiation-induced reprogramming of breast cells," found that ionizing radiation reprogrammed less malignant (more differentiated) breast cancer cells into iBCSCs, helping to explain why conventional treatment actually enriches the tumor population with higher levels of treatment-resistant cells. [i]
