Pomegranate extract may prevent prostate cancer or slow its growth, if results of lab experiments conducted at the University of Wisconsin in Madison translate to real-world benefits.
Dr. Hasan Mukhtar and his colleagues note in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition that pomegranates are high in polyphenolic compounds, making its juice higher in antioxidant activity than red wine and green tea.
Continue reading ‘Pomegranate juice promising for prostate cancer’
When US adults were polled about certain erroneous cancer ‘myths’, the most widely believed misconception was that surgical removal of a cancer can cause it to spread throughout the body.
The next most common misconception? A cure for cancer already exists but it is being withheld from the public in order to increase profits.
The new findings, which appear in the medical journal Cancer, come from a telephone survey of 957 randomly selected adults who reported never having been diagnosed with cancer.
Forty-one percent of subjects believed that surgery could, in fact, spread a malignancy to other regions of the body, lead author Dr. Ted Gansler, from the American Cancer Society in Atlanta, and colleagues note. Twenty-seven percent of the people surveyed thought there was a conspiracy to withhold a cure for cancer from public knowledge.
The third most common cancer myth was that there are no effective medications for cancer pain, endorsed by 19 percent of respondents.
Continue reading ‘And the Number One Cancer Myth Is…’
HOUSTON, Jul 12, 2005 (United Press International via COMTEX) — Turmeric, a spice that is a key ingredient in Indian curry dishes, contains a potent cancer-fighting agent, the New York Daily News reported Tuesday.
A study published in the upcoming issue of Cancer magazine related that curcumin, a chemical pigment in turmeric, helped stop the spread of breast cancer tumor cells to the lungs of mice.
Now doctors have launched clinical tests to see if it works on humans, said Bharat Aggarwal of the Department of Experimental Therapeutics at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, who led the study.
Earlier studies suggest that people who eat diets rich in turmeric have lower rates of breast cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer and colon cancer, Aggarwal said.
He noted that many cancers are 10 times rarer on the Indian subcontinent than in the West.
Continue reading ‘Curry spice found to fight cancer’
New research reaffirms the potential value of green tea as a natural substance able to stop cancer before it starts.
“What we do in our conference every year is focus on what the scientists are talking about,” said Jeffrey Prince, vice president for education and communications of the American Institute for Cancer Research.
Prince and others spoke at a news briefing at AICR’s annual International Research Conference on Food, Nutrition and Cancer in Washington. He said this year’s conference includes six separate presentations on the benefits of green tea — and no tea companies were involved in the research.
The AICR also released the “New American Plate Cookbook,” featuring recipes designed to promote smaller portion sizes and increased consumption of fruits and vegetables.
“The American Institute for Cancer Research recommends a mostly plant-based diet to people concerned with reducing cancer risk,” Prince said.
Many plant-based foods are rich in anti-oxidants, which limit damage to cells and tissues that toxins and pollutants cause by slowing the rate of certain chemical reactions.
The active ingredient in green tea is a compound called epigallocatechin gallate, or EGCG, a stronger anti-oxidant than is contained in either vitamin C or E, according to an AICR fact sheet. Green tea is made from the same plant as black tea and oolong tea, but the leaves are not fermented during processing, which apparently preserves the plant’s cancer-fighting compounds.
Continue reading ‘Green tea suggests cancer cure’
(Reuters) – A common virus that is harmless to people can destroy cancerous cells in the body and might be developed into a new cancer therapy, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
The virus, called adeno-associated virus type 2, or AAV-2, infects an estimated 80 percent of the population.
“Our results suggest that adeno-associated virus type 2, which infects the majority of the population but has no known ill effects, kills multiple types of cancer cells yet has no effect on healthy cells,” said Craig Meyers, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Penn State College of Medicine in Pennsylvania.
“We believe that AAV-2 recognizes that the cancer cells are abnormal and destroys them. This suggests that AAV-2 has great potential to be developed as an anti-cancer agent,” Meyers said in a statement.
He said at a meeting of the American Society for Virology that studies have shown women infected with AAV-2 who are also infected with a cancer-causing wart virus called HPV develop cervical cancer less frequently than uninfected women do.
AAV-2 is a small virus that cannot replicate itself without the help of another virus. But with the help of a second virus it kills cells.
For their study, Meyers and colleagues first infected a batch of human cells with HPV, some strains of which cause cervical cancer.
They then infected these cells and normal cells with AAV-2.
After six days, all the HPV-infected cells died.
The same thing happened with cervical, breast, prostate and squamous cell tumor cells.
All are cancers of the epithelial cells, which include skin cells and other cells that line the insides and outsides of organs.
“One of the most compelling findings is that AAV-2 appears to have no pathologic effects on healthy cells,” Meyers said.
“So many cancer therapies are as poisonous to healthy cells as they are to cancer cells. A therapy that is able to distinguish between healthy and cancer cells could be less difficult to endure for those with cancer.”
AAV-2 is being studied intensively as a gene therapy vector — a virus modified to carry disease-correcting genes into the body. Gene therapy researchers favor it because it does not seem to cause disease or immune system reaction on its own.
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