A bridge between neuroscience and oncology: prostate cancer genesis A 'negative' consequence of learning?

Prostate cancer has become the most commonly diagnosed cancer in men over r ecent years. The initiating mechanism for tumorigenesis within the prostate remains an unknown. The observation, that the cancer incidence in patients with chronic neurological disabilities is significantly lower than in the normal population lead to the hypothesis, that changed processing due to a barrage of aberrant sensory information within a healthy CNS can trigger ev ents within the prostate cell, that cause malignant transformation. There i s a broad overlap of cellular mechanism of gene expression, that lead to ei ther long term potentiation, learning and memory storage or deregulated dif ferentiation and malignant transformation. (C) 2001 Harcourt Publishers Ltd .