Healing from surgery may help spread of cancer
Study finds promise in anti-inflammatory drugs
Doctors have long wondered why breast cancer patients are more likely to see their cancer spread within the first 18 months after a lumpectomy or mastectomy.
A new study suggests the wound healing that follows surgery may trigger this spread.
As the immune system works to heal the surgical scar, it stops restraining cancer cells that have wandered far from the tumor site, according to the study published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine. Without this brake, those cancer cells are free to grow and become new, more dangerous tumors.
“It’s not the actual surgery, but instead, it’s the post-surgical wound response,” said Robert Weinberg, the paper’s senior author and a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It is provoking already disseminated cells to begin to grow into clinically detectable metastases.”
The same study suggests there may be a simple solution: taking an anti-inflammatory drug.
A few days of anti-inflammatory therapy kept the immune brake engaged in mice and prevented spread, according to the study. Research in people hinted at the same benefit, although more studies are needed to confirm it.
Michael Retsky, an oncology researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and University College London, said his own research in people isn’t definitive, but it has convinced him that the benefits are probably real. In a small study, he showed that breast cancer patients who got the anti-inflammatory drug ketorolac for a few days around the time of surgery were five times less likely to have their cancer spread than people who didn’t get the prescription medication. Retsky hopes trials will begin soon in Nigeria to test the benefits of adding ketorolac.