The Next Steps
The team on the study hopes that the information they discovered will eventually lead scientists to be able to stop the hijacking process that happens when cancer development begins.
To do that, they first need to figure out how the hijacking happens. Hou and her colleagues hope to expand their research to include women and people of a wider variety of ethnicity, to see how different bodies are affected by the process.
In addition, they also want to expand their studies to look at traditional cancer risk factors – environment and lifestyle factors, for example – and how hey affect telomeres.
Expanding The Research
Other research on telomeres has provided even more insight into how telomeres are affected by and can indicate disease risk.
A study published in the journal Nature Genetics reports that certain genetic causes can make the length of some peoples’ telomeres vary – something which can predispose individuals to certain pathological diseases(5).
Scientists have faced difficulty in studying the relationship between telomeres and cancer prior to these studies.
One of the difficulties researchers have faced is the fact that cancer treatment itself can lead to telomere shortening, which has led to previous studies being somewhat inconsistent.
Scientists have struggled to find causal information linking telomere shortening – but with these new studies coming out, many are hopeful that this research may lead to earlier cancer detection for patients.