We are special cancer patients!

I just read this and want to get it out to people fast since it is very important for anyone with cancer.  The article is quite technical so I will try to summarize it including some additional background for the general person:

1. Cancer can be summarized as essentially cells in your body going bad and refusing to function normally.  They grow and replicate even when your body tells them to die.  Many factors lead to this, but really it is mostly just bad luck.
2. Part of how your body can make a cell die has to do with the cholesterol in the cell.  Reducing the cholesterol can cause the bad cell to die.
3. C282Y Homozygotes are special.  This variation itself, not as a result of its affect on increasing iron storage, alters cholesterol both in its own cell and in the persons body.
4. C282Y Homozygotes have lower overall cholesterol and especially lower LDL cholesterol than other people.  But we also have more cholesterol stored in our cells.  This makes it harder for all of our cells, good or bad, to die.
5. Statins reduce cholesterol inside our cells and may cause cancer cells to stop growing, replicating or flat out kill them for cancer patients with C282Y.
6. Scientists are still trying to understand C282Y's role in cancers happening for us, but they have its role in treatment of cancer well understood.
7. This is related to cells that express the HFE protein, therefore not all cancers may respond to statins.  Certainly colon and liver cancers would.  Potentially brain, blood and kidney related cancers as well.  This was not stated in the article and is just my inference from the data.  An oncologist should be on top of this.

So, if you are currently fighting cancer it is very important to know your HFE variant status.  Make sure your oncologist is up on this.  Statins are given out too often in my opinion, but if it gives you a shot at survival then killing a few liver cells by taking it is not that big of a deal!
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