Initially, I thought all cancer started with a mutation in the p53 gene. The p53 gene is one of the genes associated with checking the integrity of a cells’ DNA. If the cell has a mutation, the p53 gene detects, and kills the cell via suicide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P53
So, my initial understanding was that with cancer, you get a mutation in the p53 gene. Then, your cells lose their ability to detect mutations. Subsequent mutations aren’t fixed, and eventually, cancer erupts.
Turns out, that’s not exactly how it works. I had a mutation in the NF-KB gene which is an oncogene. I’m not sure where the mutation is with prostate cancer, but there are multiple pathways for a cell to detect DNA instability and kill itself. Here’s some common genes that undergo mutations with prostate cancer. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16267836.
There’s a whole bunch of genes that go wrong. But here’s the important part. With me, my body was aware of the mutations, and trying to fix them. But, it’s like trying to put out a forest fire with a water hose. You can’t do it fast enough. So, the chemo is like huge water bombers. They put out most of the flames, and your body put out the rest. Also, the genes in my blood (lymphocytes) had the repair genes (tumor suppression genes) under-expressed. So, I was trying to put out a forest fire with a hose, and the hose had a kink in it.
I gave this explanation to my oncologist, and he, mildly bored with the conversation said “yeah, that’s how it works, but it’s more complicated then that”. I was pretty excited, and asked him again before he was completely bored with the discussion. So yeah, for both Gerry and myself, our body is/was actively fighting the cancer, just not fast enough.
I realized pretty early on that chemo would kill 99.999% of the cancer, but it wouldn’t kill all of them. So, I was happy once I realized that your body could kill the last few malignant cells thru DNA repair.
So, basically, my goal was now to figure out how to upregulate the rate of DNA repair. You can do this three ways:
- diet,
- exercise, and
- lifestyle (sleep, meditation, etc).
With diet, the best thing for me to do is short, all out sprints. But, this isn’t good for Gerry because short sprints cause the body to create big surges of testosterone. So, no good. With prostate cancer, you want long low exercise. So, lots of walking.
That said, with exercise, you can only do so much… But, the diet thing is more interesting… It gets a little complicated.