researcher could figure out four different possible results of any one substance in terms of how it affects DNA.
These are:
1. A substance acts as a carcinogen. The substance, such as nicotine taken into the body directly or indirectly through cigarette smoke, causes an increase in deregulated DNA activity by penetrating and holding open cancerous cellular DNA strands for an excessively long period of time, sometimes even permanently. Destabilization of the DNA of a healthy cell results from long and cumulative exposure to carcinogens (just as it happens in life but not in a fast, in vitro test). This carcinogenic effect is exhibited only on DNA that has been destabilized and can become cancerous. It does not take place with normal DNA. That is to say, the duplication of the DNA originating from healthy cells is barely changed, even in the presence of a carcinogen. However cancerous DNA is significantly affected. Subsequently carcinogenic substances selectively target DNA which is already slightly destabilized. All known carcinogens act in this manner in the Oncotest. Other examples include steroid hormones and Vinblastine, a type of cancer drug that stops cells dividing.
2. A substance has a neutral potential . This type of neutral substance has no effect on the duplication of either normal or cancerous DNA. Cholesterol, insulin, and riboflavin are examples of neutral substances.
3. A substance has toxic potential. The adverse substance poisons the polymerase enzyme which performs the DNA duplication. When this kind of toxicity occurs, neither type of DNA (normal or cancerous) is duplicated or replicated. The common herbicides paraquat and diquat are substances with toxic potential.
4. A substance inhibits the duplication of cancerous DNA. There are some substances in nature which inhibit the duplication of cancerous DNA, but at the same time they cause no interference with the healthy DNA’s duplication. These would be the ideal anticancer substances, but is there such a substance in nature? That was the “what’s next” question that propelled Beljanski into, perhaps, some of the most notable research in his life.
Case Study: Breast Cancer
Breast cancer is the most common malignancy in women, affecting more than one in eight females living in industrialized western nations. Specifically 184,450 American women developed breast cancer in 2008, and approximately 50,000 died from it. (While the case history to follow involves a French patient, we could not learn how many French women had contracted it in that same year.) However, of those fifty-thousand diagnosed but now dead American women, most likely many of them had learned of their health problem much earlier. The disease is most treatable when detected in its earliest stages.
For decades, breast cancer was treated by the Halstead radical mastectomy procedure or a modified radical mastectomy, but the approach during the past three decades has gradually changed to those procedures which are less debilitating. Conventionally, as of this writing, most breast cancer patients are treated with more limited surgery (a lumpectomy which removes the cancer and some surrounding tissue, rather than the entire breast), chemotherapy, and radiation. Women with hormone sensitive breast cancers are usually treated with drugs that reduce the effects of estrogen on the cancer. These include drugs such as tamoxifen or aromatase inhibitors like Arimidex¨ or Femara¨. In addition, more and more women are electing to engage in programs that involve changes in lifestyle, including improved nutrition, exercise, stress management, nutritional supplements, and relatively non-toxic intravenous treatments, such as high-dose, intravenous Vitamin C therapy.
For homemaker Henriette Bouchet (Mme. Bouchet), the myriad of methods for treating breast cancer were of little concern until October 1986, when she discovered a tiny lump in her right breast. A week later the growth had
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