A man is afflicted with a terrible disease. Doctors give up all hope. And suddenly the disease recedes. It's a great soap opera plot, but it happens in real life too. The question is how?
What is spontaneous remission? The medical community is trying to ignore spontaneous remission, also known as self-healing, but the reason is not a sinister conspiracy. In fact, some doctors do not believe in this phenomenon - at least for certain diseases - but most of them simply try not to allow people to indulge in false hopes, and more importantly, to use false medicines.
Internet sites suggest a variety of ways to achieve spontaneous remission, from ginseng to positive thinking. And although almost all of these methods of treatment do not cause physical harm to a person, extracting money from sick people is not so harmless.
Some professionals don't like the word spontaneous. They believe there is a mechanism behind the decline in disease. Such assumptions are based on the fact that in some types of cancer the patient's condition improves faster than in other types of this disease.
Five types of cancer - kidney cancer, leukemia and lymphoma, neuroblastoma, breast cancer, and melanoma - are relatively prone to causeless remission. Other cancers, such as pancreatic cancer, very rarely undergo spontaneous remission, and the few reported cases of this phenomenon may have been due to a misdiagnosis.
"Spontaneous remission" is a popular term, but a more accurate definition is "spontaneous regression".
Although some cancers go away permanently due to spontaneous regression, most often the spontaneous improvement in patients' condition lasts only a short time, after which the cancer returns and progresses in its usual course.
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Even a temporary regression of the disease can give the patient additional years of life, or at least a significant improvement in his quality of life. All oncologists hope for the recovery of their patients, they just do not count on the fact that this will happen suddenly and without treatment.
What causes spontaneous remission?
Doctors are trying to get rid of the "spontaneous" component of spontaneous remission, but they are not driven by the desire to refute the miracle. Their goal is to transform a miracle into something earthly. If there is a mechanism that can be used to fight cancer, finding and replicating it in every patient's body could save countless lives. Oncology is a science associated with many painful procedures such as chemotherapy and surgery. Finding a treatment method that is invisible to patients would be a huge leap forward in patient care.
So far, the term "spontaneous" remains unchanged because the causes of remission and regression are still unknown. Many have tried to find out the reasons for this process. One study presents a wide range of ideas:
The mechanisms leading to spontaneous regression are widely hypothesized that the host's immune response is the most important component. Other mechanisms that induce spontaneous regression include increased apoptosis and necrosis, epigenetic changes, hormonal responses, the effect of oncogenes and tumor suppressors, cytokines and growth factors, and physiological mechanisms.
This leaves a lot of room for various manipulations.
Scientists have also found several inextricable links. In one confirmed case, a marked regression of pancreatic cancer occurred after an infection caused a patient to experience a severe fever. In a number of other cases, with cancer, a relationship between "febrile infection" and regression and remission was also found. Several authors have proposed rethinking controlled fever as a way to trigger an immune response that can fight cancer.
Is spontaneous remission more common than we might imagine?
According to some studies, spontaneous remission and regression occur much more often than described in the literature. The studies carried out confirm that a large number of cases of spontaneous remission were not recorded due to the fact that the doctor suggested an erroneous diagnosis, did not want to describe the case in detail, or due to the fact that the patient felt better and stopped treatment.
Several studies have shown that spontaneous remission may occur in a significant number of cases.
In one study, researchers followed people with one or more solar keratoses for 12 months and noted that a third of the subjects experienced spontaneous remission. Solar keratosis is not cancer; it is a callus-like growth on the skin that forms when the skin is damaged by the sun. By itself, solar keratosis is not dangerous, but it is comparatively prone to becoming cancerous. The fact that solar keratosis can heal for no apparent reason suggests that other tumors can heal spontaneously as well.
The most significant study related to spontaneous regression ended in 2001. Between 1996 and 2001, researchers invited women between the ages of 50 and 64 for regular screening for breast cancer. It would be unethical to ask other women to refrain from such medical examinations in order to form a second group, so there was no parallel group of women not undergoing examination.
Instead, at the start of the study, the researchers recruited women of the same age who had not undergone the procedure in the past six years. The cumulative incidence of cancer in women who were regularly screened was higher than among those who were screened only six years later.
The researchers found that in the group [regularly] screened, the cumulative incidence of invasive breast cancer remained 22 percent higher. Breast cancer could have been caused by regular screening, or a large percentage of the disease simply regressed without treatment.
The idea that someone might have cancer without knowing it is terrifying. But at the same time, it is encouraging. Spontaneous remission can pave the way for less spontaneous treatment.