The BRCA effect on metabolism seems to revolve around insulin and glucose and fats; but not in the ways we, as laymen, would think about these molecular compounds. Not the “sugar causes cancer” thing, but the fact that even though cancer cells “prefer” glucose, they can also use fermentation ( no glucose) to get energy. The needs of the tumor cell to reproduce and grow at a rapid rate is so vast that they can learn to use almost any compound in order to grow….they are hungry! So avoiding all sugar really won’t help you all that much - they’ll use something else.
The insulin is a little trickier in that it doesn’t exactly mutate, but becomes useless in some obese individuals with BRCA mediated cancers; but did they become obese because of this or did their BRCA mutated cells have some component which made the insulin stop working, inducing diabetes?
There are papers written on an atomic level (really) that talk about this enzyme donating so many electrons to such and such as to forego active phosphorylation….etc, etc.
Biochemists can’t even follow these complicated pathways - we certainly cannot either! Suffice to say that when you skip down to the “Conclusions” section of the paper you are given a host of conflicting scenarios, observations that openly contradict one another ( and acknowledged by the authors), and many more questions than answers….exhausting!!
I think that some cancers- especially those mediated by an enigmatic mutation like BRCA - will never be totally understood; but the fact that science has come up with PARP inhibitors which prevent the tumor cells from repairing themselves is as close to divine justice as you can get: the BRCA mutation, which prevents DNA from repairing itself, is now prevented from repairing ITS OWN DNA by an inhibitor and it slowly dies….Is that symmetry, or what??