The 61-year-old man, who was not named in the study, examined his Hodgkin’s lymphoma last summer, but just days later he was rushed to hospital with coronavirus. The man has apparently recovered, and a follow-up to his cancer detection found that tumors that had sown his torso a few weeks earlier had almost disappeared, Wales Online reports.
Doctors treating his blood cancer at Royal Cornwall Hospital in Truro, Cornwall, believe the effects of COVID-19 may have helped his body destroy the disease.
Dr Sarah Challoner, one of the medics, said: “We think Covid-19 elicited an immune response against tumor.”
And Professor Angus Dalgleish, a cancer specialist at St George’s Hospital in London, said: “Covid-19 infection seems to have been the trigger in these cases. Spontaneous remission of cancer is known to occur, but it is unbelievable. Rare.”
It is believed that infection-fighting cells, called T cells, were released on a large scale by the immune system to try to shoot down the coronavirus, also attacked cancer cells which it considered ‘foreign’.
Hodgkin’s lymphoma is a type of blood cancer that develops when white blood cells grow out of control and spread to the lymph nodes.
But health workers have argued that more research needs to be done.
The newspaper, British Journal of Hematology, highlights the man from Cornwall who developed pneumonia, pneumonia caused by coronavirus.
He was put on oxygen to help him breathe while his lungs recovered, and he was kept in hospital for 11 days, before being completely home. It was one week later when a cancer scan showed the remarkable results.
However, Martin Ledwick, chief nurse for cancer research in the UK, emphasized that his case could be coincidental.
He said: “At this stage it is too early to draw conclusions from these cases – it is quite possible coincidental.
“Anyone undergoing cancer treatment should continue to follow the advice of their doctors, as well as protect themselves from catching COVID-19. And we encourage everyone to take the vaccine.”
Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, said: ‘The message for anyone with cancer is that the chance of you being deliberately exposed to Covid-19 in the hope that it will cure you, until your untimely doom leads as to heal.
‘I do not think we fully understand the mechanisms, but probably the immune response is the reason for it.
“Tumors often elude the immune system, and in this case Covid infection seems to have started the immune system very effectively. Given how common cancer is and how common COVID-19 is, it may not be surprising that we see more. spontaneous remission associated with a coronavirus.
“But proving cause and effect will be very difficult unless we see quite a few such apologies.”