For a long time, doctors have used their sense of touch to find out what’s wrong with a patient.
By feeling for lumps or hard spots in the body, they could often tell if someone had cancer. This method works because some cancers make tissues stiffer than normal.
In particular, doctors noticed that areas in the liver could get really stiff when a person had a condition called cirrhosis, which can lead to liver cancer.
But a group of scientists from Stanford University has found something new.
They discovered that how a liver behaves—sort of like how Silly Putty stretches first with some resistance and then gets easier to stretch—might be a better way to find liver cancer early, especially in people with type 2 diabetes.
This discovery is important because people with type 2 diabetes are more likely to get liver cancer, even without having cirrhosis.
And since more people worldwide are getting diabetes, especially in places where it’s hard to get healthy food or exercise, liver cancer is becoming more common.
Up until now, doctors have been checking for liver cancer mainly in people with cirrhosis.
But this new research, led by Dr. Natalie Torok, suggests that they should also be looking at how the liver’s physical properties change, particularly in people with diabetes. This could help catch liver cancer early in a lot more people, not just those with cirrhosis.
Dr. Torok and her team worked with other researchers, including Dr. Ovijit Chaudhuri, to study this new idea.
They looked at liver samples from patients, tested on animals, and even grew cells in the lab to see how this stretchiness, called viscoelasticity, plays a role in liver cancer.
The way they figured this out is pretty interesting. Doctors can measure how stiff the liver is by using special scanning machines that gently vibrate the abdomen and see how those vibrations move through the liver.
If the liver is really stiff, it might mean the person has cirrhosis and could be at risk for liver cancer.
But it’s not just about being stiff. The liver and other organs are held together by a network of stuff called the extracellular matrix, which is like a scaffold that keeps everything in place.
This scaffold helps cells grow right and work together. If the scaffold gets messed up, cancer cells can start to grow out of control.
The Stanford team’s work is a big deal because it could change how doctors look for liver cancer.
Instead of just checking people with cirrhosis, they might start using these new ideas to test people with diabetes too. This could help catch cancer earlier and give people a better chance of beating it.
In simple terms, this research is like finding a new clue in the mystery of how cancer starts and grows. And by understanding this clue, doctors can get better at solving that mystery and saving lives.
The research findings can be found in Nature.
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