Common pain drug may prolong survival for brain cancer patients, Mass General Brigham study finds
'This study is an exciting step forward,' Dr. Joshua Bernstock, the study's lead author and a clinical fellow in neurosurgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital, said in a press release. 'The discovery that an already approved medication with a favorable safety profile can extend overall survival represents a meaningful and potentially practice-changing advance.'
Researchers turned to gabapentin after studies in cancer neuroscience suggested that brain tumors may hijack neural signaling to fuel their growth. A 2023 Nature Communications paper pointed to thrombospondin-1, a protein that helps neurons communicate, as a key contributor to tumor growth. In animal models, gabapentin appeared to block that activity.
Advertisement
Bernstock's team combed through the medical records of 693 glioblastoma patients treated at Mass General Brigham. Many had been prescribed gabapentin to treat chronic nerve pain. Those patients had a median survival of 16 months — four months longer than those not on the drug.
Advertisement
To test whether the trend held up elsewhere, the team partnered with UC San Francisco researchers who reviewed data from 379 additional patients. Their results showed an even greater gap: patients taking gabapentin lived 20.8 months on average, compared to 14.7 months for those who didn't.
'There have been very few advances in survival for GBM patients since the early 2000s,' Bernstock said. 'We need to think more creatively about the emerging biology in these tumors and how to target them.'
Because the study wasn't a clinical trial, the researchers emphasized that randomized studies are needed to confirm gabapentin's effect and better understand its relationship to thrombospondin-1.
This story will be updated as more information becomes available.
Nathan Metcalf can be reached at
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
18 hours ago
- New York Post
Exercising within 4 hours of bedtime is messing with your sleep
Sweat dreams? While trying to get ripped is an admirable goal, new research reveals that doing it at night might just be muscling into your REM cycle. High-intensity workouts four hours or less before bed were linked to poorer sleep quality, later bedtimes and a higher resting heart rate. 3 While you may know that working out right before bed isn't good for you, this is the first and most extensive study to understand why. Pormezz – They were also associated with lower heart rate variability, meaning less variation in the time between heartbeats, which is generally a sign of stress or poor recovery. All of the markers indicate strenuous exercise that close to lights out puts the body into a heightened state of alertness, hindering the transition to restful sleep. Strenuous exercise is defined as activities that require a lot of physical effort — typically elevating the heart rate to 70% to 85% of maximum capacity — such as biking uphill, engaging in HIIT or playing sports. While experts have generally agreed that working out right before bed isn't good for you, this is the first and most extensive study to illuminate why. 3 This graphic from the study shows actual exercise timing and strain associations with sleep and nocturnal autonomic activity. Nature Communications (2025) 'Intense exercise in the evening can keep the body in a heightened state of alertness, which is why public health guidelines have previously advised against working out too close to bedtime,' lead author Dr. Josh Leota, a research fellow in the School of Psychological Sciences at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, said in a statement. 'However, findings from controlled laboratory studies are less conclusive, with many suggesting that evening exercise doesn't necessarily disrupt sleep.' These studies relied on small sample sizes and laboratory settings, Leota said, and rarely involved exercise that made substantial cardiometabolic demands on the body. For his research, Leota and his team analyzed data from 14,689 people over the course of one year, which translated to a whopping 4 million nights of information. Participants wore a health-tracking wristband called WHOOP to monitor their sleep, exercise and heart health. The findings were adjusted for factors such as gender, age and general fitness level, lending further credibility to the study's conclusions. 3 The study found that doing high-intensity workouts four hours or less before bed led to poorer sleep quality, later bedtimes and a higher resting heart rate. oneinchpunch – The results were published recently in the journal Nature Communications. Studies indicate that exercising in general is good for sleep, with some researchers reporting that short, light workouts before bed can help you sleep longer, lower blood sugar levels and potentially live longer. So, if you do find yourself wanting to work out a couple of hours before bed, Leota suggests choosing 'brief low-intensity exercises, such as a light jog or swim, to minimize sleep disruption and allow the body to wind down.' Or, for added gut health benefits — just take a fart walk.
New York Times
21 hours ago
- New York Times
MRNA, Used in Covid Shots, May Help Rid the Body of H.I.V.
The technology that powered Covid vaccines may also lead scientists to a cure for H.I.V. Using mRNA, Australian researchers said they were able to trick the virus to come out of hiding, a crucial step in ridding the body of it entirely. The research, published last week in Nature Communications, is still preliminary, and so far, has been shown to be successful only in a lab. But it suggests that mRNA has potential far beyond its use in vaccines as a means to deliver therapies against stubborn adversaries. Short for messenger RNA, mRNA is a set of instructions for a gene. In the case of Covid vaccines, the instructions were for a piece of the coronavirus. In the new study, they are for molecules key to targeting H.I.V. 'mRNA is just this miraculous — I really do think miraculous — tool to deliver things that you want into places that were not possible before,' said Dr. Sharon Lewin, director of the Cumming Global Center for Pandemic Therapeutics in Melbourne, who led the study. Vaccines deploying mRNA instruct the body to produce a fragment of the virus, which then sets off the body's immune response. In the United States, the shots were initially hailed for turning back the pandemic, then viewed by some with suspicion and fear. Some officials, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have falsely said that they are highly dangerous and even deadly. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services sought to limit the vaccine's availability to pregnant women, children and healthy younger adults. The administration also canceled a nearly $600 million contract with the drugmaker Moderna to develop an mRNA shot for humans against bird flu. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Long, dark 'streaks' spotted on Mars aren't what scientists thought
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Mysterious dark streaks flowing across Mars's surface may not be the result of running water after all, a new artificial intelligence (AI) analysis suggests. The streaks, first observed running along Mars's cliffsides and crater walls by NASA's Viking mission in 1976, were long thought by scientists to have formed as a result of the flow of ancient water across the now mostly desiccated planet's surface. But an AI algorithm trained on slope streak observations has revealed a different origin for the streaks — likely being formed from wind and dust, not water. The findings, published May 19 in the journal Nature Communications, could have important implications for where humans choose to explore Mars, and the places they search for evidence of possible ancient life. "That's the advantage of this big data approach," study co-author Adomas Valantinas, a planetary scientist at Brown University, said in a statement. "It helps us to rule out some hypotheses from orbit before we send spacecraft to explore." The sinewy lines are darker than the surrounding Martian ground and extend for hundreds of meters downhill. The shorter-lived of these features are called recurring slope lineae (RSL), and regularly spring up during Mars's warmer spells. This led some planetary scientists to suggest that seasonal temperature fluctuations could be causing ice or frozen aquifers to melt, or humid air to condense, sending streams of salty water trickling down the planet's craters. If this were true, it would make these regions of particular interest to future Mars missions. Related: Curiosity rover finds largest carbon chains on Mars from 3.7 billion-year-old rock To investigate this, the scientists behind the study trained a machine learning algorithm on confirmed streak sightings before making it scan through 86,000 satellite images to create a map of 500,000 streak features. RELATED STORIES —NASA may have unknowingly found and killed alien life on Mars 50 years ago, scientist claims —'Building blocks of life' discovered on Mars in 10 different rock samples —Just 22 people are needed to colonize Mars — as long as they are the right personality type, study claims "Once we had this global map, we could compare it to databases and catalogs of other things like temperature, wind speed, hydration, rock slide activity and other factors." Bickel said. "Then we could look for correlations over hundreds of thousands of cases to better understand the conditions under which these features form." Using the map, the scientists found the streaks were most likely to form in places where wind speed and dust deposition was high, suggesting that they came from layers of fine dust sliding off steep slopes. Other studies have pointed to tantalizing evidence of water and even life on Mars. If the study findings hold up, they could serve as a guide to sift between the Red Planet's useful leads and its red herrings.
