Could you catch cancer? Alarmingly, new understanding of the microbiome suggests this could well be possible. It would appear quite possible that pathogens causing cancer in one animal, could be passed to another, and their influence would be determined by the new host microbiome health.
We increasingly understand that pathogens and microbes in the gut can provide messenger RNA not just toxins, and that these mRNAs can micromanage your own microRNA destined to provide you with a normal healthy body.
And we know that after taking drugs, particularly immunotherapy drugs, PPIs and antibiotics, the healthy microbiome is damaged and that it never returns to the exact healthy state it was in before. The loss of diversity and ’good bacteria’ allows the hardier pathogens to take over the shop while the normal owners are away.
We know that you can rebalance your gut by either killing the pathogens with herbs like artemisinin, pau d’arco or goldenseal and adding back lost members by eating probiotic foods each day. This takes a while to achieve.
You could short-circuit this process by having a Fecal Transplant. Fecal Microbiome Transplantation (FMT) allows people to quickly reintroduce a healthy balance back into the gut after it has been damaged. For example, patients in hospital for relatively monor operations can get a dominance of a virulent pathogen, Clostridium difficile, after having antibiotics and damaging their microbiome. This causes IBS and even death. 14,000 people a year die in US hospitals from this occurrence.
This can be reversed by the use of FMT; and there are Clinical Trials to prove it.
So the question is therefore, could you catch a pathogen from someone and it lead to illnesses other than IBS? Could it even lead to cancer?
In research from the University of Michigan using mice, samples of the microbiome community were taken from mice with colon cancer and transferred to healthy mice. These then developed colon cancer at twice the normal rate. Researchers stated that they were ‘convinced that it is the community that is driving tumorigenesis. "It’s not just the microbiome, it’s not just inflammation. It’s both" (November 2013 mBio online).
This of course has quite staggering implications, not least could you ‘catch’ cancer? But to is yet more confirmation that your sick gut microbiome makes you ill.
The researchers set out to answer a simple question - which comes first? Do you develop cancer and this negatively affects your gut bacteria, or do they get sick first? Chicken or egg?
Patrick Schloss one of the lead researchers at Michigan is convinced that sickness in the microbiome bacteria is the driver. In the mice with colon cancer, bacteria such as Bacteroides, Odoribacter, and Akkermansia were at high levels, while there were lowered levels of the Prevotellaceae and Porphyromonadaceae families.
But three weeks after the healthy mice had been ‘contaminated’, they too had similar levels of these bacteria in their gut, and then the colon cancers started to appear. Schloss concluded that the inflammation is changing the community and the community is inducing inflammation. “They make each other worse to the point that you have higher rates of tumor formation.”
Maybe developing cancer is not ‘all your own fault’ after all.
Chris Woollams, former Oxford University Biochemist and author of bestseller ’Heal your Gut; Heal your Body’, said "When we do Personal Prescriptions for people at CANCERactive, we often see factors that helped build a body conducive to cancer over a 6 - 10 year period. But in the end, something tips people over the edge about 18 months before. For example, long-term, we have had many people with chronic fatigue syndrome, IBS, Crohn’s, fibromyalgia,or Hashimoto’s. What can tip people over the edge 18 months before can be anything from the stress of losing a job or a loved one (both alter gut bacterial composition) to going for a simple operation (appendicitis) to a dose of pneumonia and being given antibiotics. If you want a body conducive to health, you must heal your gut."