Why are the tissues of the heart less susceptible to cancer than other types of human tissue? Can we learn something from this to fight cancers in other parts of the body?
鈥� While it is true that primary cancers of the heart are extremely rare, they do occur and are known as angiosarcomas. A 20-year study in Japan looking at heart tumours found an incidence of 0.1 per cent in 12,487 autopsies, with the vast majority of the tumours being benign. It is more common for cancer to spread to the heart as a secondary growth. Common cancers that do this are sarcomas, melanomas and lymphomas.
One general rule of thumb is that the more dividing cells there are in an organ the more likely it is that the organ will develop cancer. So bowel, breast, skin and bone marrow have a higher risk of developing cancer than the heart, which is essentially non-dividing.
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鈥淚t is unlikely that investigating why hearts do not develop cancer will lead to a cure鈥�
It is unlikely that investigating why heart tissue does not develop cancer will lead to a cure for cancer. Cancer is a group of more than 200 diseases collected under one name. Most scientists and doctors are resigned to the fact that we will not find a single cure and are looking instead at treating cancer as a chronic disease, in a similar way to heart disease or AIDS, for which treatments are intended to prolong life using a cocktail of drugs.
Phil Mayor, Education & Training Coordinator, Nottingham Cancer Centre, Nottingham, UK