UVA researcher links breast cancer to unhealthy gut.
Dr. Melanie Rutkowski
Photo by Dan Addison / courtesy of UVA
Having an abnormal microbiome may encourage the spread of breast cancer, found Dr. Melanie Rutkowski, an assistant professor with the UVA Cancer Center in the department of microbiology, immunology and cancer biology. “What we think is happening is that an unhealthy gut increases inflammation,” she says. “Tissue inflammation then results in increased metastasis.”
Rutkowski used much larger than normal doses of antibiotics to disrupt the equilibrium of the microbiome—the collection of microorganisms that live in the gut and elsewhere—in mice with hormone positive receptor breast cancer. Those with an unhealthy microbiome had at least double the chances of increased metastasis.
“There was a lot of existing evidence to suggest that an unhealthy gut associates with a poor outcome in breast cancer, but I was actually surprised that [the condition] was actually all you needed to make the tumors much more aggressive,” she says.
For now, Rutkowski’s study adds to the growing research showing the importance of a balanced microbiome. “Big picture, this really highlights the necessity for living a healthy lifestyle—exercising and eating well and limiting smoking and alcohol. When you’re doing that, you’re also keeping your gut healthy,” she says. UVAHealth.com
This article originally appeared in our December 2019 issue.
