Professor Rafael Tabarés-Seisdedos, full university professor of Psychiatry at the University of Valencia and principal investigator of one of the groups of the Center for Biomedical Research on Mental Health Network (CIBERSAM), has received the Royal Academy Award of Medicine of the Valencian Country for the research he conducts about the direct and inverse associations between cancer and diseases of the brain and the nervous system.
This finding will be published on February 20, 2014 in ‘PLOS Genetics’, one of the most important international journals in the field of genetics.
The award delivery and academic appointment will be held on 16 May.
Professor Tabarés-Seisdedos and his team, in collaboration with the teams of Professor John Rubenstein at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF ), Professor Alfonso of the National Centre of Oncology Research (CNIO), Professor Edward Vieta at the University of Barcelona, Professor Benedicto Crespo-Facorro at the University of Cantabria, Professor Salvador Martinez at the Institute of Neuroscience at Alacant and doctor Català-López of the Spanish Agency for Medicines and Health Products, have shown in several articles published international journals of high impact ‘Nature Reviews Neuroscience’, ‘Molecular Psychiatry’, ‘Neuroepidemiology’, ‘Psychotherapy & Psychosomatics’ i and 'PLOS Genetics’, that the presence of certain diseases of the brain and the nervous system, especially those who have a neurodegenerative component, is associated with the decrease of risk to suffer cancer.
The most striking example is the Alzheimer's disease, in which researchers find a significant 50% reduction in the risk of cancer. The authors call this epidemiological evidence " reverse comorbidity " and believe that there must be several factors, including lifestyles, medication or genetic, which explain this protective effect.
The identification of mechanisms of reverse comorbidity can help, from a new and unexpected perspective, to understand better these diseases that cause so much suffering and that are part of the group of public health problems with greatest significance at a global scale. In addition, the understanding of this protective effect could help to develop new and more efficient drugs for these diseases.
Recently, the authors have shown that a series of genetic and biological processes are altered in opposite directions in three cancers (lung , prostate and colon-rectal) and three brain diseases (Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia), which could be the first molecular evidence of the inverse association between cancer and brain diseases.
The diseases under study are Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Huntington's disease, multiple sclerosis, Down syndrome, schizophrenia and autistic spectrum disorders.
Last update: 12 de february de 2014 12:55.
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