There are a little more than 300 people in the world with the
condition Laron dwarfism, a third of whom live in remote villages in
Ecuador’s southern Loja province (Zapotillo, Macará, Celica)
Dr Jaime Guevara-Aguirre, a hormone expert from the Ecuadorian Institute of Endocrinology, who has been studying Laron dwarfism for more than ten years, said: ‘We’ve discovered that people with Laron simply don’t get cancer.
‘Cancer can be detected in their relatives of a normal size, but never in my patients – not one single case.
‘Every experiment has demonstrated that high levels of IGF1 are associated with cancer, but these patients have low levels of IGF1 and an absence of the disease.’
According to Dr Guevara-Aguirre, finding a way to reduce levels of IGF1 could mean finding a way to prevent cancer from developing. ‘Medically, this is very, very exciting,’ he said.
