Worried That Inflammation Is Enabling Metastasis

I know what literature say and I disagree. I think it is the other way around. I think inflammation is a sign the body mounts a serious fight against something. Could be that it detected cancer cells from previous cancer or something new.

I had autoimmune thyroid disease (Hashimoto) and systemic inflammation for 10 years before my cancer diagnosis. I had elevated ANA among others. Tried everything to keep it under control but couldn't. Curiously, the disease did not progress -usually ends up with thyroid nodules given enough time and often thyroid cancer.

And then I discovered the breast cancer. Reading the literature I found that breast cancer cells could produce a mutated thyroid peroxidase, the protein against which I have antibodies. Other autoimmune disease (scleroderma) has been linked to faulty proteins produced by cancer cells. It also make sense to me now why chemotherapy often works to keep under control an autoimmune diseases, a fact I knew for long time, but never linked it to a possible underlying cancer.

While inflammtion is a sign that something is going on, the final outcome is harder to predict. The body might be successful to clear it up, or might need external help.

What causes an autoimmune response? It does not come out of thin air. It has to be a faulty structure (most likely protein, produced by a benign or malign tumor) that the body recognizes it. Multiple autoimmune diseases are treated with chemotherapy: Lupus, scleroderma, rheumatoid arthritis. Having an autoimmune disease significantly increases the risk of developing cancer. It all tights up.

mstein, thank you for bringing this work to my attention, I will go through it. However, I did know about the connection between inflammation and cancer, although I have never looked over the details. Having an autoimmune thyroid disease, I was told this increases my risk of thyroid cancer. So for 10 years or so I did everything in my power to reduce the inflammation without much success. My focus was on external factors, diet especially, due to the circulating theories about autoimmunity, biological mimicry, gut permeability and so on.

It was only after I got the cancer diagnosis that I come over the opposite hypothesis, that cancer could drive the autoimmune response. The paper was published in Science in 2014, so it is still quite recent that this idea was articulated loudly. Since then, I found another work from U Penn where they report treating a dangerous autoimmune disease, encephalitis, by removing ovaries found to have a benign tumor in two patients, while on the third they removed the ovaries without any sign of growth, but later it was found to have microscopic benign tumors. Inspecting the protein atlas, one could see that the protein the patients had antibodies against was produced mainly by brain, but also in small quantities by female reproductive tissues.

And finally, I could see a major improvement in my autoimmune symptoms after cancer treatment. I am currently reducing the medication, after 10 years of being on it. In fact, my doctor suggested to try stopping it, but I don't dare to do that yet.

Now we'll see if this will last. I think with cancers, cells always remain behind and the autoimmune response continue. I guess that's why most people with autoimmune disease are not cured after cancer treatment, although they do often see a remission of the disease attributed to the decrease in the wbc levels.

I could not agree more. I feel that doctors are frozen in time and "space" (their own narrow focus). Understanding of the human body and diseases advances at an accelerating speed, but it seems it takes decades until most agree with on a discovery, and more decades until the knowledge is used in clinical setting.