Unmasking the Superheros in Society: Cancer Predisposition Discussed

Last week, my lecturer told the class a story of an elderly woman that she knew, approaching the triple digits in age, who had smoked all her life and never developed cancer. Very mysterious, right? (In my opinion, it is this phenomena that gives few people a reason to ignore common causes of cancer!)


She used this point to illustrate the fact that in basic terms, some people have better DNA repairing capabilities than others. Daily, our cells repair hundreds of DNA aberrations, and for the most part, these do not progress to oncogenesis. I then found THIS article (written by Cath Ennis) which discussed this topic using the film 'Unbreakable' as an example - the two characters in this film are contrasting, one with a brittle bone disease, and another who is of course, impervious to illness or harm. Why is it that some lucky ones manage to 'dodge' this? What is making them seemingly unbreakable, or superhuman, just like Bruce Willis?

Interestingly, it was a reader of Cath's blog that suggested that it could potentially be more useful to study the mechanisms that 'protect' some people carrying hereditary cancer defects who do not develop cancer. And, if you think back to that elderly woman, she was seemingly healthy, yet younger smokers may develop cancer. Considering all of the carcinogens in cigarettes, some would say that developing cancer would be an inevitability - but why do some people manage to resist this? There must be something inherent to some people's repair mechanisms that are different from those people facing cancer at very young ages.

Off the top of my head, I can already think of some reasons why - maybe some people have a greater genetic predisposition, maybe it depends upon the age at which you start smoking/drinking etc, maybe it depends upon your environmental exposure to form that 'second hit' (double hit theory), maybe... this list could go on, and so could this debate.

I thought this article was a really good read, and discussed some interesting cases (Angelina Jolie's recent double mastectomy, putting the BRCA gene into the public eye) as well as reasons behind the previous lack of research into this area, and how current research into genome sequencing is moving in the direction of assessing patients whom have avoided illness. This is an exciting aspect of novel cancer research, which could open many doors to the future of novel treatments.

Read the article here!