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Monash Lens
Stress is bad, right? It feels bad, and is bad for you. The causes are different for everyone. But how exactly does stress – and nerves – relate to a chronic illness such as cancer?
Erica Sloan
Associate Professor, Drug Discovery Biology, Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
Monash University’s Associate Professor Erica Sloan, a scientist who specialises in cancer biology and neuro-immunology – how nerves talk to immune cells – began digging into this question 15 years ago, and is now able to say she’s getting much closer to the answers.
Those answers involve all these things – nerves, cells, the immune system, bodily organs, and also the ancient physiological phenomena known as the “fight or flight” response, or stress response.
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A team of researchers from Monash University has discovered that a cardiac drug (carvedilol) could greatly reduce breast cancer progression, with those taking the drug at the time of diagnosis also much more likely to survive.
Carvedilol is a beta-blocker used to manage cardiovascular disorders including hypertension and chemotherapy induced heart disease.
In collaboration with a team from the Cancer Registry of Norway, the researchers investigated the effects of carvedilol in a large cohort of breast cancer patients (4,014) and found that if women happened to be taking carvedilol when they were diagnosed, they had a greater chance of survival than those not taking the drug.