In another summary at medicalXpress, the researchers mention melatonin<p>"Our research shows that the escape of circulating cancer cells from the original tumor is controlled by hormones such as melatonin, which determine our rhythms of day and night"<p><a href="https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06-breast-cancer-night.html" rel="nofollow">https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06-breast-cancer-night.h...</a>
My general lay-person understanding is that your immune system is less active when you sleep. While I hate the way we tend to overlook other elements of the immune system and act like white blood cells are your entire immune system, in this case it may be very pertinent because white blood cells travel in the blood.<p>They may basically be going out into the blood when there are fewer white blood cells roaming the corridors, looking to kill something.
“Wake up” is a stretch, we have no idea what is going on here. Would be good to see how people’s circadian rhythms and sleep quality affected this process, maybe the cancer cells are being disposed of by the body during sleep and that process is disregulated. Fascinating research but I think getting to any real understanding from this is a way off.
So.. pretty much we can't rely on existing mechanisms in our bodies to defeat cancer. Obviously.. we need to find damaged cells, remove them, and replace them with undamaged cells. Likely we need to do this on a continuous basis.
If we can figure out why this occurs during sleep, maybe we can trick cancer cells into thinking the patients are awake all the time (without actually affecting sleep wellness).
> <i>To do this, the team grafted breast cancer tumours into mice</i><p>Speaking of sleep, if I was doing the above I'm not sure I'd ever sleep well again.