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 recent 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 events within the prostate cell, that cause malignant transformation. There is a broad overlap of cellular mechanism of gene expression, that lead to either long term potentiation, learning and memory storage or deregulated differentiation and malignant transformation.