BACKGROUND:

Self-breast exam, examination by a health-care provider, and mammography continue to be the mainstays of early breast cancer detection although none of these methods is fail safe. Increasing rates of breast cancer mandate that additional safe, early, painless, and inexpensive methods of detection be discovered. One potential method involves evaluation of circadian temperature patterns of breast tissue which in the presence of a malignancy have been shown to become asynchronous from patterns of normal tissue.

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8.1 Conclusions

Handling the complexity of cancer diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis would not have been possible without the availability of the currently improving imaging systems. Today’s latest imaging systems play a major role in the primary cancer screening, in the diagnosis and characterization of lesions, staging and restaging, treatment selection and treatment progress monitoring, and in the determination of the cancer recurrence.

Abstract

The precise mitochondrial alterations that underlie the increased dependence of cancer cells on aerobic glycolysis for energy generation have remained a mystery. Recent evidence suggests that mitochondrial uncoupling – the abrogation of ATP synthesis in response to mitochondrial membrane potential – promotes the Warburg effect in leukemia cells, and may contribute to chemoresistance.

 Abstract

There is a growing body of evidence implicating aberrant circadian clock expression in the development of cancer. Based on our initial experiments identifying a putative interaction between BRCA1 and the clock proteins Per1 and Per2, as well as the reported involvement of the circadian clock in the development of cancer, we have performed an expression analysis of the circadian clock genes Per1 and Per2 in both sporadic and familial primary breast tumors and normal breast tissues using real-time polymerase chain reaction. Significantly decreased levels of Per1 were observed between sporadic tumors and normal samples (P < .00001), as well as a further significant decrease between familial and sporadic breast tumors for both Per1 (P < .00001) and Per2 (P < .00001). Decreased Per1 was also associated with estrogen receptor negativity (53% vs 15%, P = .04).

 Abstract

It is now recognized that the breast exhibits a circadian rhythm which reflects its physiology. There is increasing evidence that rhythms associated with malignant cells proliferation are largely noncircadian and that a circadian to ultradian shift may be a general correlation to neoplasia.

Newswise — DALLAS – Nov. 7, 2013 – UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers report that disrupting the light-dark cycle of mice increased their susceptibility to inflammatory disease, indicating that the production of a key immune cell is controlled by the body’s circadian clock.