turning the wrong switch with inflammation fuels cancer and...

[Hopeful]

Lani,

Thank you. I find all information useful, and I learn so much from the articles you post and the information everyone here shares. I know that Herceptin is supposed to enhance the immune system response, so your anectdotal evidence of it curing allergies makes perfect sense.

I know that some cases of skin eruptions are linked to auto-immune diseases, which seem to occur at a higher rate in bc patients. I guess someday all the interactions of these pathways will be mapped, but for now it is more a labrynth than anything else.

Hopeful

[Lani]

there are papers showing treatment to decrease T regulatory cells enhances the efficacy of antiher2 vaccines (or vaccines against other breast cancer antigens)-- see papers by K.Knutson of Mayo Clinic

Actually decreasing T regulatory cells is said to be a good thing in breast cancer patients, as it helps the body recognize the breast cancer as something to be attacked. However, decreasing T regulatory cells can also
cause a patient to attack their own self-antigens CAUSING an autoimmune-like disease.

I have read that herceptin decreases T regulatory cells, but don't know by how much ie, what the risk of autoimmune like disease might be. But there are many people on this board who have been on herceptin for years and noone has listed that yet as a sideeffect, real or perceived, from herceptin (I started such a thread perhaps a year ago and it pops up intermittently)

We are only in the infancy of understanding of the immune system it seems

[heblaj01]

The findings described in the previous posts about the role of inflammation in cancer, brings up in my mind one of the possible related roles of vitamin D3 in regulating the immune system from over or under stimulation.

For instance preclinical studies have shown that vitamin D3 fights autoimmune diseases & one clinical trial has been verifying its effects on rhumatoid arthritis (which incidentally has been found associated with greater incidence of cancer):
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct/gui/sho...25714?order=42
Vitamin D Deficiency Causes Immune Dysfunction and Enables or Perpetuates the Development of Rheumatoid Arthritis

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/lin....01204.x/full/
Identification and immune regulation of 25-hydroxyvitamin D-1-α-hydroxylase
in murine macrophages

This indirect role of vitamin D on inflammation would be one of its other modes of action
which are claimed to provide protection against cancer as evidenced by the statitics published last year.