Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine blocked nerve signals to the prostate in mice, by cutting the nerves or deleting the receptors they act on, then compared tumor development against normal mice.
Cutting the sympathetic nerves chemically or surgically, or deleting the receptors they signal through in prostate tissue, prevented the early phases of tumor development. Once a tumor had already formed, a second nerve type, the parasympathetic fibers, took over and drove its spread to other organs instead.
A separate, blinded analysis of prostate tumor samples from 43 patients backed up the mouse findings: denser sympathetic nerve fibers in the tumor and denser parasympathetic fibers in the surrounding normal tissue both tracked with worse clinical outcomes. The work reframed the prostate tumor's nervous-system connections as an active participant in cancer progression rather than incidental wiring.
Read the original study
Magnon et al., Science, 2013 · doi.org/10.1126/science.1236361
The tumor was listening to the nerves.
Source
- Magnon, C., Hall, S. J., Lin, J., Xue, X., Gerber, L., Freedland, S. J., & Frenette, P. S. (2013). Autonomic nerve development contributes to prostate cancer progression. Science, 341(6142), 1236361. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1236361