"Imagine that one medical advancement held the promise to conquer cancer, perhaps within your lifetime … the potential to also end more than 70 of life's most threatening conditions, affecting one billion people worldwide. This is the promise of angiogenesis, the first medical revolution of the 21st century." --William Li
Angiogenesis is the development of new blood vessels. Blood vessels don't normally grow in adults except in three cases: to form the placenta, to form the lining of the uterus, and to grow under scabs to heal wounds. When there is a fault in angiogenesis, big health issues arise. An example of angiogenesis out of balance is when the body is unable to produce enough blood vessels in the right place at the right time, or is creating too many blood vessels that can feed tumors. If too little are produced, problems such as wounds that don't heal, heart attacks, strokes, and nerve damage arise. If too many are created, problems like blindness, obesity, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer arise. Cancer was the focal point of this talk because cancer is a hallmark of angiogenesis out of balance and because the common factor between ALL types of cancer is problems with angiogenesis.
Anti-angiogenesis helps patients restore the balance of their blood vessels by targeting the blood vessels that feed a tumor. Experimental medicines with anti-angiogenic treatments have been created and tested through people and animals. The results have been remarkable, and in some types of cancer the life expectancy has more than doubled. Anti-angiogenic therapy has had remarkable results, but the problems is that results were not always consistent. Li answered that this was because they were trying to treat cancer too late in the game. The cancer had already formed and they were simply trying to ward it off. With this, Li went into researching how to get cancer to not form in the first place. Surprisingly, he found that certain foods have anti-angiogenic factors, and by eating those foods, we can keep cancer at bay. Varieties of foods and spices with seemingly no similar factors have been found to have anti-angiogenic properties and can aid in preventing cancer.
This TED talk was extremely interesting to me and left me yearning to learn more about cancer. I loved the idea of a new, less painful treatment for cancer, but the effectiveness of this cure was debatable. Why did anti-angiogenic treatments work remarkably in some cases and not at all in others? Why do some foods have anti-angiogenic properties and others don't? Lots of questions remain unanswered from this talk, but one thing remains clear: the cure for cancer is on the horizon.
To watch this TED talk, click here:
To see a list of anti-angiogenic foods click here:
To learn more about eating to defeat cancer, click here:
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