What Causes Glioma? First Hypothesis

Why would a Mechanical Engineer with an MBA that currently works in Marketing think that he might substitute thousands of researchers and doctors trying to answer the same question? I don't know, I just like to solve problems, and this is my biggest one!

To be clear this is not a profound scientific research, it is just a compilation of hypothesis from someone that spends an awful amount of time thinking about gliomas. I hope that a real scientist feels compelled to dig deeper into these ideas and maybe provide a real answer to this century-old question.

As you probably know there are no obvious reasons why Brain Tumors occur. I've read a lot about this with no conclusive answer, so I started doing my own research.

Most doctors will say that head and neck cancers or tumors are highly correlated with alcohol and cigarette consumption. In addition genetic factors play a big role, and I just found out that I hit the jack-pot on this one. I am a breed of Portuguese, German and Dutch immigrants and these rank in the 14th, 16th amd 29th positions in my brain tumor per 1000 people incidence rank out of 167 countries.

I targeted alcohol consumption after finding out that Germany had a 3 times higher Brain Tumor incidence than the world average, and we all know what Germans are famous for, aside from being very industrious.

In addition I found out that brain tumors for some reason are correlated to height. In fact my wife's grandfather died from a gliobastoma, and he was 1.92m, my exact same height. Oscar Schmidt, a legendary basketball player in Brazil, also suffered from an oligoastrocytoma, the exact same brain tumor I carry.

I ran some correlations between alcohol per capita consumption, average height and life expectancy vs. brain/nervous system tumors and found stunning correlations. The sources of my data were:

Brain and Nervous System Cancer Incidence by Country: Globocan 2008 WHO Research
- http://globocan.iarc.fr/

Per capita alcohol consumption: World Health Organization, found in Wikipedia through the link below:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_consumption

Average Height - Males 20+ years old:
http://www.interbasket.net/news/4385/2009/09/average-height-by-country-males-20-years/

Now let's go to the correlations between the factors analyzed and brain tumor/nervous system cancer incidence:

1. Average Height: 70%
2. Recorded per capita alcohol consumption: 62%
3. Life Expectancy: 60%

These are all simple single-variable correlations that simply reinforce factors that are available in several scientific papers but the numbers stunned me. In addition there are some flaws in the numbers I analyzed such as I only looked at Male Average Hieght and Brain Tumors occur in males with a higher incidence. In addition GLOBOCAN statistics have several approximations in cases where data was not available, such as using neighboring countries as proxies for countries that did not have data available.

Nonetheless I have to mention another big surprise: 4 out of the top 5 countries in Brain Tumor incidence are Nordic countries:
1. Denmark
2. Norway
3. Finland
4. Serbia
5. Sweden

I looked at life expectancy to adjust for people that simply by living longer have a higher chance of having anything, but height and alcohol consumption surpassed life expectancy in my correlations, to my surprise.

But one unanswered question remains: why do brain tumors also occur in kids? Seizures are usually the smoking gun that announce a brain tumor. One common reason that leads kids to have seizures is hyponatremia, or water intoxication. This led me down a hypothesis that combines alcohol consumption in adults and a potential cause that can be common to kids: dehydration.

The Hypothalamus is the brain region responsible for regulating water absorption through antidiuretic hormone (ADH). It also produces oxitocin, which is now being researched as potentially being responsible for ethical behavior. When alcohol is ingested it affects ADH, increasing urination and leading to dehydration. I can't comment on oxitocin. If somehow we are dehydrated the hypothalamus might go nuts and the excessive electrical stimulus might lead glial cells to be more active. This might be a completely silly hypothesis but I am not implying that I have the answer, this is just a question.

Another crazy hypothesis I created based on a sample of one is Folic Acid consumption. Folic Acid is present primarily in leaffed vegetables, which have been nearly neglected from my diet throughout my life. I found out that when kids with leukemia had folic acid injected into their blood stream the rate of reproduction of their blood cells got even worse. When I had my first daughter I adopted a product called Instant Breakfast, a chocolate milk my wife's doctor recommended her to get the necessary folic acid needed during pregnancy. I figured that if it was good for her it would be good for me as I never used multi-vitamins. I drank one a day for 7 years nearly every day.

I have capped my current knowledge but I will continue to study and provide new ideas, I hope these are real ideas and not just rumblings from an ignorant undoctor.