A team of researchers from IRB Barcelona have published an article in the journal Nature, which is collected by the Sinc Agency, where they show how palmitic acid, one of the main fats in palm oil, promotes cancer metastasis, which is the cause of 90% of deaths from this disease.
This new work indicates how a diet rich in palmitic acid alters the cancer genome and increases the probability that it will spread. Thus, the study shows how oral tumor cells and melanomas from patients have been exposed to a diet rich in said acid and it has been observed that they have a greater capacity to metastasize in mice, even when this diet is supplied for a very long period. brief of time. This is because the modifications generated by the fatty acid on the genome of metastatic cells are permanent.
The authors, IRB Barcelona scientists led by Salvador Aznar-Benitah, believe that these results can be extrapolated to sick people: “We have seen with gene expression data from various types of cancer in hundreds of patients that the pathways we have studied correlate with a poor prognosis in several of these tumours”, he explains to SINC.
The researchers have identified a series of markers of exposure to palmitic acid in tumor cells: a change that makes them maintain a greater metastatic capacity, even months after being exposed to the fatty acid, and that could be related to a greater capacity for these tumor cells to innervate.
Does not occur with other types of oils
The results indicate that a diet rich in palm oil would be detrimental to the development of cancer, even if it occurs at a very early stage of the disease in which the primary tumor may not yet have been detected. Scientists have also observed that this expansive and colonizing capacity is acquired due to the consumption of palmitic acid (predominant in palm oil), but this is not the case with oleic acid (very abundant in olive oil) or acid linoleic (characteristic of flaxseed).
These results suggest that aggressiveness is not only related to fat metabolism, but also to the epigenetic modifications that occur in tumor cells when they ingest palmitic acid.
The key to palm oil metastasis
For a tumor cell to metastasize, it must first detach from the tumor of origin, enter the blood or lymphatic vessels, reach another vital organ, and survive and grow there. In this study, the authors have identified that a diet rich in palmitic acid allows tumor cells to create a neural network around the tumor.
The most metastatic tumor cells acquire the ability to call the nervous system and the neural network that forms around the tumor generates a regenerative environment, which the cells use for their own benefit, to grow and expand.
One of the key elements in the formation of the neural network that favors metastasis are the so-called Schwann cells, which surround and protect neurons. This new work shows that blocking Schwann cells through different pathways inhibits the formation of this nerve network, and metastasis does not take place.
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