Sorry, but No.  GSK 3 is short for Glycogen Synthase Kinase 3 – no link to the Pharma company whatsoever.

Kat -   No, it isn’t.  This is something that Linus Pauling put around - the idea that you take massive doses of vitamin C and it can stop you getting cancer or treat cancer.  And basically, there’s no scientific evidence that this works.  However, about a year or so ago, there was a paper that showed that injections of vitamin C may help some treatment.  I can’t remember all the details, but we certainly blogged about it on the Cancer Research UK Science blog.  But it’s important to stress that obviously, vitamin Cs are anti-oxidants and taking high doses of anti-oxidants may well interfere with some kinds of cancer treatment in ways that we don’t really know and again, it’s something that we have blogged about and it’s an area that’s really quite interesting because people do love to take vitamin pills.

Chris -   Indeed.  There was also a Meta analysis by Goran Bjelakovic who’s at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.  I remember this coming out last year and they looked at many, many thousands of people who’d all been in little trials on giving anti-oxidant vitamins like vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin K, selenium, and that kind of thing, vitamin C, and compared that with people’s outcomes if they didn’t take vitamins.  And in fact, in many cases, they found that some chronic vitamin treatments actually resulted in people having a higher mortality rate and morbidity rate than people who didn’t take any of these supplements.  A modest increase in risk, but at the same time, vitamin A and vitamin E did increase the risks.  So, the chances are, yes, it’s based on sound physiological principles, trying to take anti-oxidant but the outcomes don’t necessarily fit the facts at the moment.  So, needs more work I guess is the bottom line.

Kat -   Absolutely none.  This kind of information goes around and round on the internet but no, there’s been a lot of scientific studies done with large – huge, thousands of women and basically, there’s no difference.  Using an anti-perspirant will not increase your risk of cancer.  Neither will having underwire in your bra that’s too tight or any of those things that go around the internet in hoax emails.

Chris -   I suppose it’s a flaw in statistics, isn’t it?  They're saying, if you look at people who use underarm deodorants, they're more likely to get cancer.  But then everybody uses an underarm deodorant so therefore, by sheer fluke, you're going to see people having breast cancer because it’s a common disease.

Kat -   Also, in people who don’t use underarm deodorants, you still get a case of breast cancer.  I mean the best thing is to check out something like cancer help UK to find out whether this stuff is actually true and try and find out.

Chris -   Actually, this is a phenomenon that’s very well described.  People who get malignancies very often lose dramatic amounts of weight and people who get HIV also lose enormous amounts of weight.  What they both have in common is that the immune system is often driven into overdrive.  It’s pushed very hard.  But scientists didn’t really know, aside from saying, it must be some kind of production of signalling hormones in the immune system.  They couldn’t really tell exactly what the culprits were.  But then about a year – no, a couple of years ago now almost- a paper was published in Nature Medicine.  It was by Haiko Yonan et al and what they did was to find one of the factors that seems to cause this dramatic weight loss.  

They were using mice and they had mice in which they implanted a prostate cancer sample.  And those mice went on to lose dramatic amounts of weight and when the scientists compared the levels of various chemicals in the blood of the mice with healthy mice, they found that one chemical in particular, MIC-1, Macrophage Inhibitory Cytokine -1 was at very high levels.  And when they gave antibodies to that particular chemical, the mice didn’t lose any weight.

So it looks like it’s the immune system, trying to respond to the cancer or being manipulated or thwarted by the cancer and it makes these abnormal signals that it shouldn’t make.  And they then cause the appetite centre in your brain’s hypothalamus to go off kilter and it causes people to lose their appetite and stop taking in the right amounts of food.  So, they're burning off lots of energy, but they're not replacing the calories.  And as a result, they end up getting too thin and they lose all that dramatic amount of weight.

The fact they've identified one of these factors is really good news because it kind of suggests that we might be able to reverse the process.

Kat - No. It probably isn’t. Cancer cells are so mutated, it would be virtually impossible to go all the way back and in some cases, the original cell may not even be there.

Chris -  This is a really interesting question for the simple reason, when I was in Africa, I found an elephant’s leg bone and they're like a solid piece of rock.  An elephant is so heavy that it needs to have almost solid bone with no marrow cavity in the middle because the bones otherwise would not be strong enough to support the elephant’s weight.  So an elephant shunts all of its blood formation up into its pelvis which is also an important place in humans too, but it means its legs are largely solid bone with virtually no marrow in them.  Unlike a human, where most of our blood is made in our long bones, our femurs.