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During the Spring Festival holiday, learn to refuse to drink! Because every drop of alcohol you take in can cause irreversible genetic damage to your body's stem cells! Because every drop of alcohol you take in can increase your risk of cancer! Chinese drinking alcohol, it is more likely to cause cancer!
Throughout the past five thousand years, wine has a pivotal position in the hearts of Chinese! If you look at Moutai's current stock price and market value! Drinking this matter, Chinese there is a traditional wine culture in the bones: the so-called jianghu is to eat meat and drink wine in large mouths! It is necessary to get drunk to take a break to have some heroic taste of pity.
It is said that "drinking is pleasant, drinking is hurting". Some people also say that a glass of red wine every day even prolongs life. Although talking about toxicity out of dose is a hooligan, it is really not negotiable in the matter of drinking. In fact, every drop of alcohol you take may increase your risk of cancer!
Concise version
[1] Acetaldehyde, a metabolite of alcohol, makes DNA in hematopoietic stem cells unstable.
[2] Unstable DNA in hematopoietic stem cells is passed on to differentiated blood cells, inducing mutations.
[3] Chinese drinking alcohol is more likely to cause cancer! Chinese many are missing alcohol metabolism genes (ALDH2),
The symptom is "drinking and blushing", which is more likely to appear DNA damage under the influence of acetaldehyde, leading to blood diseases and even cancer.
1 Alcohol can exacerbate DNA instability in hematopoietic stem cells
Globally, alcohol consumption is inextricably linked to the onset of cancer and death. A paper published in the top international journal Nature shows that scientists at the University of Cambridge have found through animal models that alcohol and its metabolite, acetaldehyde, have a significant effect on hematopoietic stem cells: affecting DNA and inducing mutations. Once again, an important conclusion is proved: drinking alcohol has a risk of carcinogenesis! Chinese are especially dangerous!
What is the mechanism behind "drinking and hurting the body"?
The team of Professor Ketan Patel of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom answered this question. First, the mouse's mitochondrial ALDH2 gene was knocked out. According to previous studies, proteins expressed by the ALDH2 gene can efficiently oxidize acetaldehyde to acetic acid. When it is present, the acetaldehyde content in the animal body can be effectively controlled, so that the effect of acetaldehyde on DNA is minimized. Conversely, when this protein is missing, the mice are also more likely to exhibit the health effects of alcohol and its metabolite, acetaldehyde.
The facts are also as the researchers observed. The study found that in mice where the ALDH2 gene was knocked out, the number of exchanges of sister chromatids in bone marrow cells increased by a factor of 2.3! This suggests that acetaldehyde, which cannot be degraded in time, makes the DNA unstable and promotes the exchange of sister chromatids. Consistent with this observation, under the action of alcohol, the number of sister chromatid exchanges within the bone marrow cells of mutant mice soared by 4 times!
Without enzymes that degrade acetaldehyde, DNA becomes unstable
To confirm that DNA instability does occur in the cells of mice, the researchers used another validating technique: Inside the cell, if the chromosomes break, it is easy to form a "micronucleus" structure. That is, by calculating whether the number of micronuclei has increased, it is possible to know whether the DNA of mice is really more unstable. The experimental results confirmed the researchers' conjecture. The results showed that mice lacking ALDH2 significantly increased the number of micronuclei by 2.9 times.
The researchers further knocked out the FANCD2 gene in mice. This is a DNA crosslinking repair protein that helps unstable DNA repair. Once the gene was also knocked out, the number of micronuclei in mice soared by a factor of 9.5, and there were significant differences in chromosome morphology.
FANCD2 makes DNA stable
What is more interesting is that under the influence of alcohol, both the number of micronuclei that represent DNA instability and the morphological abnormalities of chromosomes have become more and more serious. These results also strongly demonstrate that alcohol and its metabolites can have disastrous consequences for DNA in animals that lack acetaldehyde degradation and DNA crosslinking repair.
Alcohol can exacerbate DNA instability in bone marrow hematopoietic stem cells
2 The effect of alcohol on hematopoietic stem cells is irreversible
The researchers' next question is how serious these catastrophic consequences really are. Previously, their subjects were bone marrow blood cells drawn from mice, and a very important type of cells in the bone marrow was hematopoietic stem cells. So they sequenced the whole genome of these hematopoietic stem cells and examined whether their physiological functions were affected.
An undesirable scene occurred. The researchers found that the activity of hematopoietic stem cells was significantly reduced under the influence of damaged DNA. In the researchers' words, these "hematopoietic stem cells are severely impaired in function and have similar characteristics to senescent hematopoietic stem cells." Unfortunately, these abnormalities are passed on to countless blood cells derived from these hematopoietic stem cells. When these blood cells that play an important physiological role in the human body are abnormal, how can people be healthy?
"DNA damage from hematopoietic stem cells can lead to some cancers," said Professor Patel, corresponding author of the study, "although some damage is random, our study shows that drinking alcohol increases the risk of damage." ”
The study, published online in the leading academic journal Nature, successfully revealed how alcohol and its metabolites can cause damage to the genome of stem cells in vivo, and also strongly supported the idea that alcohol hurts the body. It is worth mentioning that the ALDH2 gene knocked out in the study originally carried mutations in the bodies of 540 million people around the world, and it was impossible to smoothly remove acetaldehyde.
Unfortunately, Asians make up a lot of these 540 million people, and naturally Chinese – many of us blush when we drink alcohol, which is a manifestation of the lack of acetaldehyde metabolism. These drinking friends are also more likely to develop DNA damage under the influence of acetaldehyde, an alcohol metabolite, leading to blood diseases and even cancer.
Division of cancer cells
But this does not mean that you can drink casually without your face. Studies have shown that inadequate alcohol metabolism can lead to a higher risk of associated DNA damage, causing specific cancers. But there is also one important point to remember. The alcohol removal and DNA repair system is not perfect. Even in people with intact defenses, alcohol can still cause cancer in a number of ways.
3 Alcohol and cancer
We know that epidemiologically, human alcohol intake does have a clear association with an increased risk of cancer. Nearly 800,000 cancer patients worldwide every year are due to alcohol consumption! Alcohol is the "culprit" of 5.5% of cancers and 5.8% of cancer deaths worldwide.
We also know that the International Agency for Research on Cancer lists alcohol and its metabolite acetaldehyde as a Class A carcinogen! Alcohol consumption is directly related to common breast, colorectal, liver, esophageal, stomach and pancreatic cancers. Of course, the types of cancers most closely related to alcohol come from tissues that drink alcohol in direct contact with: oral cancer, laryngeal cancer, esophageal cancer, etc.
Alcohol can certainly bring pleasure, but every sip you take increases your risk of getting sick or even cancer. Here, we also urge you to think twice before drinking.
[1] Alcohol and endogenous aldehydes damage chromosomes and mutate stem cells. Nature,
[2] Proportion andnumber of cancer cases and deaths attributable to potentially modifiable riskfactors in the United States. CA Cancer J Clin.
Who holds the color to practice the dance in the air: stem cell basic and clinical research progress
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