A new study published Thursday (Oct. 29) in the journal Nature Medicine compared colorectal tumors from people between 29 and over 90 years old, and it revealed key differences between young and old patients.
"I believe that our study is essentially a turning point now in the field," Anderson told Live Science. "Because up until now, we've had more questions than answers."
Beyond questions about what's driving this uptick in cases, another mystery has been why this disease is so deadly in young people.
The reason why colorectal cancer is often aggressive in younger patients hasn't been clear. (Image credit: Gerardo Huitrón via Getty Images)
To investigate that mystery, Anderson collaborated with Dr. Kimmie Ng, an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Dr. Ramnik Xavier, a gastroenterologist at the Broad Institute and Mass General Brigham. They used a method of analyzing RNA in cells that allowed them to work with frozen and banked tumor tissue. RNA, a cousin of DNA, reflects the genes that are active in cells. In all, the team analyzed 189 tumors: 54 from patients under 50 and 135 from patients over 50.
For starters, younger people had a higher proportion of connective tissue cells in their tumors than they did of malignant cancer cells. That pattern was flipped in patients of older ages. Having a smaller proportion of malignant cells might sound good, but connective tissue in tumors can secrete compounds that suppress the immune system, Anderson said. That helps protect the tumor from immune cells that might otherwise target its cells for destruction.
Based on patterns of gene activity in the tumors, the researchers suspect that younger patients' cancer cells also show distinct activity related to cell-to-cell communication. That may help the cells migrate through the body more easily than cancer cells in older patients do. In other cancers, this kind of gene activity has been linked to more aggressive tumors and a greater chance that the disease will spread, or metastasize, Anderson said.
Related storiesThe study's results also turned up an intriguing mystery: the presence of lots of long noncoding RNA. These strands of RNA contain more than 200 building blocks, called nucleotides, that don't provide instructions for building proteins. Coding RNA, in contrast, is ferried to protein-building factories in cells to be used as blueprints.
Anderson and her team are already working on manipulating the RNA they found inside cancer cells in petri dishes. In time, this line of research could supply another piece of the puzzle, helping scientists understand why colorectal cancer is so aggressive in young people.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice
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