A new study by UC San Diego School of Medicine professor Raphael Cuomo suggests some health factors are simultaneously good and bad for you.
UC San Diego School of Medicine professor Raphael Cuomo has discovered what he calls a “groundbreaking new medical phenomenon” in which some factors are simultaneously good and bad for health, depending upon a person’s state of illness or wellness.
The phenomenon, called “Cuomo’s paradox,” points to the need for personalization based upon health status, he said.
Cuomo introduced the paradox Aug 1 in The Journal of Nutrition, noting that “certain exposures, such as obesity, alcohol intake and cholesterol, confer increased risk for chronic diseases [but] … once diseases like cancer or cardiovascular disease are diagnosed, these same exposures may be associated with improved survival outcomes.”
In the example of obesity, Cuomo said, carrying “additional adipose tissue is going to result in changes to your hormones, changes to your immune system, lots of different negative effects that are going to increase your risk for the development of cancer.”
But that same weight “is going to decrease your risk from mortality from cancer,” the prevailing thought being that patients who are overweight might be “able to tolerate treatment better and to survive longer and maybe have higher doses of treatment,” he said.
What Cuomo’s paradox indicates is a broad need for the “personalization of behavioral factors,” Cuomo said. “You have to consider where you are in your own health. … We can’t just adopt a one size fits all approach to our behaviors.”
Those in the research and medical communities, he said, could take this new discovery and examine epidemiological analyses of these risk factors separately for disease prevention and disease survival.
“We cannot, as a community of researchers, make blanket recommendations that something is going to be healthy across the board,” Cuomo said. “We need to be specific about for whom it is healthy, according to the health of that individual, the health of that population of people being studied.”
Cuomo, whose research runs the gamut on a wide variety of risk factors for noncommunicable and chronic diseases, wasn’t specifically looking for the paradox.
“I uniquely have my eye on a lot of different kinds of outcomes for a lot of different diseases,” he said. “As a result of that, I am cognizant of a lot of the literature on both survival and risk of the disease development and for long-term disease.”
In poring through various findings, Cuomo realized “the evidence was building up that there were divergent associations between the development of diseases and survival policies for a number of different factors, behavioral and otherwise,” he said, a trend of paradoxical observations that can be posited as a general framework to promote specific of guidance.
The formalization of Cuomo’s paradox does not “give people the license to just do whatever they want,” Cuomo said.
“It is saying that based upon some serious conditions, like the development of a cancer or … heart failure, you really should consider tailoring your behaviors to what’s specifically going to be beneficial for you in that situation.”
