Is stress more dangerous than previously thought?

It is widely known that taking too much stress is quite harmful to our health. But this news alleges that it is more critical to health than believed. A new study from Yale claims that stress may provoke signals that may be the reason for the cells to become tumors.

So far, majority of the study authors were of the opinion that over one cancer-causing mutation is required to occur in a single cell for the tumors to develop. The study demonstrated that cancer-causing mutations may assist in encouraging tumor growth even when they are placed in diverse cells in a tissue.

Tian Xu, lead author of the study, who also is an expert with the Yale Cancer Center and the Fudan-Yale Center for Biomedical Research at Fudan University in China, commented, “The bad news is that it is much easier for a tissue to accumulate mutations in different cells than in the same cell.”

The Yale team included fruit flies in the study to examine the movement of two genes identified to be caught up in growth of human cancers; a gene known as RAS has supposedly been concerned in around 30 percent of cancers, and a tumor-suppressing gene named scribble, which apparently adds to tumor growth when mutated. Neither a mutated RAS nor the faulty scribble alone may be the reason for cancer. Experts in the Xu lab formerly illustrated that a grouping of the two inside the same cell may activate malignant tumors.

Nevertheless, the Yale team seemed to have discovered that these mutations supposedly were not obliged to co-exist in the same cell to cause tumors. A cell with only mutant RAS could grow into a malignant tumor if aided by a close by cell with flawed scribble. They also discovered that stress conditions like a wound may set off cancer development. For example, RAS cells supposedly turned into tumors when a wound was provoked in the tissue. The offender underlying both phenomena apparently turned out to be an indicating procedure known as JNK, which is said to be triggered by ecological stress conditions.

Xu mentioned, “A lot of different conditions can trigger stress signaling: physical stress, emotional stress, infections, inflammation – all these things. Another bad news for cancer.”

The Yale team discovered that the JNK stress signaling appears to move from one cell to the subsequent one, but apparently the spread may be obstructed.

The research was published in the journal Nature.