Nick Norwitz breaks down a 2026 study showing how chronic stress signals from the brain travel to the liver, lowering NAD+ levels and crippling the immune cells that normally catch cancer before it starts. The brain-liver-immune pathway explains why stress doesn't just feel bad: it can actively enable tumor growth.
Chronic stress drives liver cancer. That's not me being hyperbolic, that's literally the title of this new 2026 paper that is mind-blowing. I doodled the summary here, but basically, don't be intimidated, what happens is that the brain can register stress, send a signal via a neuron to the liver, and change gene expression patterns in the liver, leading to a biasing of metabolism. Really what happens is there are decreased levels of a molecule called NAD+. This ends up causing mitochondrial dysfunction in immune cells. They're called CD8 T cells, and this alters immunosurveillance, permitting cancers to grow and proliferate. So literally, chronic stress can drive liver cancer.
