Immune System Involved in Cancer Prevention

The April 26, 2001 issue of the journal Nature reports that scientists at Washington University and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York have come to the conclusion that the immune system is involved in preventing cancer.

25 years ago, scientists thought that the immune system was able to prevent cancer by identifying and destroying cells that had begun the process of transforming into cancer cells. This process came to be known as "immunosurveillance".

Scientists abandoned this concept when an experiment in the late 1970s showed that the immune system played no part in cancer prevention. In that experiment, cancer cells were transplanted into mice with normal immune systems and mice with destroyed immune systems. The mice with destroyed immune systems didn't develop cancer any more than those with normal immune systems.

The only problem was that the 1970s experiment was flawed. It turned out that the mice with supposedly destroyed immune systems still had a certain type of immune system cells called lymphocytes that form an active part of the immune system.

The recent New York research repeated the 1970s experiment and used mice with destroyed immune systems that truly lacked lymphocytes. It was amply demonstrated that the nervous system does indeed help in the prevention of cancer. The mice without lymphocytes developed tumors earlier and more frequently than the mice with normal immune systems.

By way of commentary, with the immune system under direct control of the nervous system, lifetime Chiropractic Wellness Care is vitally important to a healthy and fully functioning immune system. Everyone who wants a properly functioning immune system needs to have their spines checked on a regular basis.

See studies on chiropractic and immunity