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maybe OT musings on MS/CCSVI/cancer

Posted: Fri Apr 06, 2012 10:59 pm
by 1eye
This may be a bit off topic. I don't know. Cancer seems to me to be a mirror image of "MS". That is, if you get one, you have less risk of the other.

I know, this is just whistling in the dark and hoping I don't get cancer.

The other evening I saw a TV program that discussed FRACTAL math. A basic descriprion would say it involved geometric shapes, made up of tiny replicas of themselves, and which in turn are parts of larger replicas of themselves. The pattern continues on larger and smaller scales ad infinitum.

They talked also about human circulation, some of which is fractal in shape. The splitting of blood vessels into smaller vessels continues all the way down to the capillaries. The length and thickness of the parent vessel scales down as well. The number of vessels at the same scale, or layer, increases geometrically with each iteration of the split, until it reaches the large number of capillaries, with the tiny diameters of individual blood cells.

In another posting I showed the effect of reducing diameter. The fractal pattern controls the diameters, thicknesses, and lengths of each child vessel. If they were each half the diameter of their parent, and the split was into two, the fluid resistance of each new vessel would be 16 times that of the parent vessel. RF2 = RF1 times (DV1/DV2)^^4, so since the ratio is 2/1, the new vessels each are (R-Parent times 16). In parallel, the flow would be split equally. At that scale of the fractal pattern, the new veins in parallel would have an 8 times bigger resistance to flow than the last. Their length and thickness count, so the total is likely to be slightly different.

They showed how, in normal tissue, splitting results in fairly orderly geometric growth. But a tumour consists of cells which do not follow the self-similar fractal pattern. There is unregulated growth, and the resulting tissues are not ordered in clean layers as they should be. In fact, this lack of fractal pattern should continue down to the capillary beds feeding the issues. The abnormal tissue has vessels which split randomly, by which time they are still very numerous and very small.

In tumour tissue, blood vessels replicate too fast. That means some vessels must be splitting into more than the normal number of child-vessels. Maybe the randomness continues into subsequent layers, and they then split into varying numbers of vessels, some with growth rates greater than normal tissue.


I bet the normal pattern continues down to the process of mitosis itself, which is the complete splitting of a cell into two half-sized copies of itself. Maybe there is a gene which controls the cellular split, which goes down to a DNA strand splitting in two. Can a cell make three copies of itself? Five? Four? Maybe if it's broken? Maybe the fractal pattern breaks at the DNA strand.

That might cause a different, higher rate of growth.

Maybe things are self-similar all the way up to the main vessels for veins and arteries connected to single organs.

Maybe there is broken replication at least down to the cellular level, so that cells split into random numbers of copies of themselves, causing uncontrolled multiplication of metastatic growths.

Maybe this gene I hypothesize is one way up in pwMS, and another in pwCancer. So there would be less chance of a sufferer getting one disease, and more chance of them getting the other.

Or maybe I am just whistling in the dark.

Re: maybe OT musings on MS/CCSVI/cancer

Posted: Sat Apr 07, 2012 6:52 am
by Cece
Interesting, 1eye.
Cancer runs in my family (and MS does not!) Stomach cancer, breast cancer, spinal cancer, ovarian cancer...
I read an article on metformin, a common diabetes drug, being a potential breakthrough against many forms of cancer. www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/9/33

A previous theory on why cancer would be lower in people with MS was that people with MS have a very active (and overactive) immune system, which is better able to find and destroy cancerous or precancerous cells.

Re: maybe OT musings on MS/CCSVI/cancer

Posted: Sat Apr 07, 2012 3:17 pm
by 1eye
Cancer does not run in my family (only two I know of: those are my brother's and our uncle's CLL, which is in the blood itself) . In my wife's there is plenty. My family seems to be a cluster of circulation problems, early heart attacks, and definitely autoimmune problems (lupus, MS, vitaligo, rheumatism, vasculitis, diabetes). We aren't sure about whether the hydrocephalus was due to trauma. I guess my own kids have the worst of both worlds.