Breast Cancer and Apoptosis
Almost all the cells in your body are being created, live a certain length of time, and then die to make place for the new cells coming along. White blood cells last only two days. Red blood cells last 120 days. Your skin cells are being made new all the time. They are the ones that flake off when you take a bath and make a ring in the tub. This programmed cell death is called apoptosis.
What has been discovered is that the cells that become cancer cells are not only those that are multiplying rapidly. White blood cells multiply rapidly and they don't become cancer cells. Rather, it's the ones that don't die on time. They don't go through apoptosis.
Progesterone Promotes Apoptosis; Estrogen Turns If Off
Research has looked into what it is that makes a cell do this. It is not instructed by some other cell. It is built into the DNA of the genes of that cell. It's designed that way. It turns out that there's a gene that will block apoptosis and try to get the cell to live longer. That gene is called BCL2. BCL2 leads to the cell becoming a cancer cell.
Breast Cancer Cells Need Apoptosis In Order To Die
The cancer cell doesn't think of itself as a bad cell. It thinks of itself as a cell that outsmarted you, and it is going to live on. You might die, but it is going to try to live on.
The gene that normally functions to cause that cell to commit apoptosis is called P53. In the 1/28/98 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) is an article entitled "To Die or Not to Die." The article discusses the cell and what controls and determines if it dies on time as it should. They refer to gene P53 as the gene that tells the cell to die on time, and BCL2 is the gene that blocks this. So if BCL2 is the dominant one you will develop cancer. If P53 is the dominant one you won't.
Inside your breast you have skin cells that line the milk ducts. You have miles of milk ducts in your breasts. These cells are like skin cells. They are being made; then they are supposed to die, and the specialized blood cells (macrophages) eat them up, because new cells are coming along all the time. Imagine if they didn't die on time, and you just retained all these cells that are being constantly made. Pretty soon your breasts would be dragging on the ground. The only way you keep normal size breasts is to have last month's cells die to make room for this month new cells. What keeps you young and healthy are those new cells coming along all the time.
Can You Cure Cancer if You Can Control Apoptosis?
The JAMA article admits that the war on cancer has been a failure. The war on cancer has been trying to find medicine that stops rapidly growing cells from multiplying so rapidly, but in the process they are stopping your own white blood cells, your hair follicles and everything else. So if they give you a medicine strong enough to kill the cancer cells, they are in the process -- killing you.
They admit that chemotherapy is a failure, except for some leukemias and lymphomas in very young children. Young children who have a real strong immune system will survive the chemotherapy and come back, expecially if they still have stem cells. But for those of us who are adults the chemotherapy strong enough to kill the cancer would have to be strong enough to kill us first. So now, the new treatment goal is how to control apoptosis to bring on cell death of the cancer cells.
Progesterone Boosts the Gene that Causes Cancer Cells To Die
Estrogen Boosts the Gene that Cause Cancer Cells Not to Die
In 1997, Dr. Ben Formby and Dr.T.S. Wiley at the University of California in Santa Barbara proved how to do that very thing. Dr. Formby is a molecular biologist from Copenhagen, Denmark, who has learned how to build cell cultures, and how to tell what specific genes like BCL2 and P53 produce. So he took the cell cultures of breast, endometrium, ovary and prostate, and he grew them in cultures.
On some he added a little estrogen (estradiol). Guess what happened. The estradiol turned on BCL2, and the cells grew rapidly and didn't die. Then he added some progesterone to it. Guess what happened. They stopped growing so rapidly; they died on time, and the cancer all disappeared. He did that for all these types of cancer.
So what do these studies tell us? The BCL2 gene stimulates the risk of cancer. Gene P53 decreases the risk of cancer. Estradiol boosts BCL2. Progesterone boosts P53. Therefore having the correct amount of progesterone in your system is what keeps cancer under control. Unopposed estradiol causes cancer.