Reviewing articles and videos on NET for inclusion on our Resources pages is frequently a mind-numbing task. So much is written in Medicalese or covers ground others have done better. Even the easier patient stories are emotionally wrenching.
But sometimes, like today, those medical pieces–flaws and all–open new windows of understanding.
NET and me
Those of you who have followed this blog regularly know that I am not content to recite fact after fact. You know I am as emotionally involved with these disease as it is possible for a non-patient to be. And you know I do not turn my brain off when I am looking at evidence. Some months back I read about prostate tumors and the search to understand why some are aggressive and some are not. According to an article in Harvard Men’s Health last fall, NETs in close proximity to prostate tumors seem to be implicated in the level of aggressiveness in prostate tumors.
That led me to speculate about the possibility of NET being a player in other aggressive cancers. I learned in June that we really had no scientific answer to that question. The research has, not surprisingly given our limited resources, not been done. (Marathon Walk Donations for NET Research)
Whether researchers have begun to do that research at this point I cannot say. I see the results of research, not the proposals the people in the labs write about what they want funding to look at. It is not until after results are published that I get anything near a look. Even then, sometimes all I can get access to is an abstract.
Warm NET gun
So I am really delighted when I get to read a whole paper–even if it means slogging through things that are not artfully written. And if I have to keep a dictionary to hand, at least I am learning a new collection of words.
Such was the case today. Cancers has dedicated its entire July issue to NET cancer. And the journal made available today the full text of a review article on NETs and lung cancer. So I curled up with the pdf and started to read.
And there it was: a warm, if not smoking, gun. It turns out that ALL invasive lung cancers are made up of a mixture of cancer cells–and that 20-25 percent of those cells are always NETs. Lung cancers are, unless purely made up of NETs, extremely aggressive. Now I have two cancers growing in close proximity to NETs–and both are aggressive. One I can see as coincidental. But a second truly raises my eyebrows. Find me a third and…
NET research plea
It will be chillingly ironic if it turns out this indolent little cancer we stopped doing research on for 40 years because so few people had it holds the key to all those really aggressive cancers that frighten the daylights out of us.
My pattern-seeking brain thinks there is something going on here. Please, someone, do the research on this I lack the credentials and skills to do.
