BREAST CANCER RESEARCH RIGHT NOW! #64: Vitamin D and Stopping Breast Cancer!

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…

Every month, I’ll be highlighting breast cancer research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you. Today: https://www.healio.com/internal-medicine/oncology/news/online/%7B23bbe444-a832-4197-8839-f398cc01ced4%7D/higher-levels-of-vitamin-d-may-lower-breast-cancer-risk

“While more early detection and improvements in treatment have reduced the mortality rate, there has been no reduction in the incidence of breast cancer in the past 20 years.”

Ouch. That’s both surprising and humbling.

After all those Relays For Life, and Susan B. Komen Race For The Cures…this?

To me as a science-based person, this says that while we are moving ahead in treatment, we are NO CLOSER TO KNOWING WHAT CAUSES BREAST CANCER TODAY IN 2018 THAN WE WERE TO KNOWING WHAT CAUSES BREAST CANCER IN 1998.

Really?

*sigh*

OK – onward then.

In a study, “Vitamin D, DNA methylation, and breast cancer”, published in the July 2018 issue of BioMed Central (https://breast-cancer-research.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13058-018-0994-y), researchers established that Vitamin D may protect menopausal women from breast cancer.

The mechanism, while is sounds complex and esoteric, is actually pretty simple.

While most of the title is understandable, ‘the heck is “DNA methylation”????

Meth…a word that our society has come to loathe and fear…is the root of a process called methylation. Simply put, it means that in a complicate molecule, a simple atom gets kicked out and a “methyl group” gets added.

We are uncomfortably familiar with “methamphetamines” because of the plague on our nation. The process apparently (https://sunrisehouse.com/meth-addiction-treatment/making/) is simple and has created leagues of “armchair chemists” who have no more idea what they are doing than the ancient alchemists did in their attempts to turn lead into gold by dumping chemicals on the gray metal found in most car batteries.

Ironically, one process of making meth involves using the LITHIUM found in “long-life” batteries. At any rate, most people know what DNA is – if not, it’s the molecule found in every one of your cells, and is a sort of code that makes you, you and me, me.

In the methylation of DNA, the molecule gets abnormally high amounts of the methyl group (a carbon atom with four hydrogen “riders”) that knock off a hydrogen on the DNA molecule and latches itself on. (Technically this is known as “hypermethylation”). The methyl group silences the creation of certain genes (a bit of code designed to make something) that “can be inherited by daughter cells following cell division. Alterations of DNA methylation have been recognized as an important component of cancer development.”

What ends up happening is a “hypermethylation of tumor suppressor genes and hypomethylation of oncogenes.” Plain English: way more methyl groups attached themselves to the genes than normal, turning off its tumor-killer force. The same thing also sucked the methyl groups away from normal cell growing genes, making THEM stop growing normally.

“Silencing of DNA repair genes through methylation of CpG islands in their promoters appears to be especially important in progression to cancer (see methylation of DNA repair genes in cancer).”

In the study noted above, researchers have discovered that: “With roughly an 80% reduction in the incidence of breast cancer [in women who had a higher amount of vitamin D in their blood than those who had a lower amount], getting a vitamin D blood level [raised] becomes the first priority for cancer prevention…Nutrition and lifestyle factors are certainly important for overall health, but they can’t replace the value of vitamin D level. The safety of this level has been demonstrated within this study as well as others.”

One side note: I was in a vitamin D study that was looking at the prevention of diabetes. I did NOT become diabetic during the study, though I was borderline. HOWEVER – I also developed a kidney stone and was immediately taken off of the mega-doses of D I was taking…

Resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_methylation#In_cancer, https://breast-cancer-research.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13058-018-0994-y,

Image: https://healthylivinghowto.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Vitamin-D.-Cancer-Treatment-Prevention-healthylivinghowto.com_.png