Link between colitis and colon cancer reportedly found

PanARMENIAN.Net - Lingering inflammation in the colon is a known risk factor for colorectal cancer and now scientists report one way it resets the stage to enable this common and often deadly cancer, News Medical reports.

Inflammation is supposed to be a short-term response to an infection or other irritant in the body that is essential to eliminating it. But when inflammation persists, it can contribute to a myriad of common conditions, from cancer to cardiovascular disease.

In their quest to determine just how chronic inflammation of our large intestines, or colon, enables cancer, a scientific team led by Dr. Kebin Liu at the Medical College of Georgia and Georgia Cancer Center at Augusta University has found it turns one more protective mechanism against us and silences another.

The pathway to cancer they delineated in the journal Cell Reports goes like this: The chronic inflammation of ulcerative colitis prompts high levels of myeloid-derived suppressor cells, or MDSCs, to accumulate in the colon. High levels of MDSCs, in turn, produce higher levels of IL-10, a cytokine known to suppress inflammation. But at this high level, the function of IL-10, like the environment in the colon, changes. IL-10 instead activates STAT3, a protein that works as a gene regulator, which in turn increases expression of two genes - DNMT1 and DNMT3b - in the colon. These genes alter the DNA of and ultimately silence a tumor suppressor called interferon regulator factor 8, or IRF8.