Alzheimer's Disease-Cancer Link

First described case of Alzheimer's disease. By Unknown - Unknown, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1595297

Sometimes serious diseases have interesting co-morbidities.  Having one disease may increase or decrease your risk of getting the other.  Such co-morbidities exist between some nervous system diseases and some forms of cancer.  Not surprisingly, Alzheimer’s disease and brain cancer are positively linked, which may be due to common changes in immune function affecting brain cells, while Alzheimer’s and lung cancer are negatively associated.  It seems that changes in the mitochondria – “the powerhouse of the cell” – that increase the risk of Alzheimer’s decrease the risk of lung cancer and vice versa.  Studying the mechanisms behind such correlations can lead to new therapies for these diseases.  From the article:

Alzheimer’s disease, lung cancer, and brain cancer—all devastating, all leading public health challenges—have been thought to harbor connections at the molecular level, connections that could explain curious co-morbidities. Specifically, in cases of Alzheimer’s disease, the risk of developing lung cancer is decreased, and the risk of developing glioblastoma, a kind of brain tumor, is increased…

…“A functional analysis of the sets of deregulated genes points to the immune system, up-regulated in both Alzheimer’s disease and glioblastoma, as a potential link between these two diseases,” wrote the article’s author. “Mitochondrial metabolism is regulated oppositely in Alzheimer’s disease and lung cancer, indicating that it may be involved in the inverse co-morbidity between these diseases.”

The authors of the current paper emphasized that they intended to explain previously published findings that overexpressed genes in central nervous system diseases (Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and schizophrenia) were underexpressed in cancer (lung, colon, and prostate), and vice versa. Understanding the molecular bases of these processes, the authors suggested, could provide valuable information regarding the study of the causes of each disease and the possible design of new therapeutic strategies (drug repositioning).