The potential role of apoptosis (programmed cell death) in a chaotic determined carcinogenesis.

The proposed hypothesis may interpret apoptosis as a dynamic parameter by means of chaos theory. Regular tissue renewal is determined by the quantity of mitosis and cell death (mainly apoptosis). These two components are describable as so-called 'limit cycle attractor' representing a reference cycle of the tissue system. If tissue kinetics remain within these limits, the system stays in a homeostatic equilibrium. Disruptive factors such as genetic alterations may have the ability to destabilize this homeostasis and induce the quasiperiodic development which represents one way in which a system becomes chaotic. The inhibition of apoptosis prevents the elimination of mutation-affected cells which leads to an uncoordinated proliferation of a mutated cell clone. Thus, this clone represents an independent oscillator which effects a new attractor: it is called 'torus' attractor. Additional perturbations induce the chaotic 'strange attractor': the system is bound to shift into chaos, morphologically detectable as cancer.