Vegetable Compounds Combat Cancer (Does High Dosage Ginger Cure Cancer?)

billscancercure@yahoo.ca · medicine forum beginner Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 4

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=00010908-EBED-1432-AB2783414B7F0000&ref=rss

In the ongoing war on cancer, researchers have enlisted a new series of
soldiers: roots and vegetables. New findings presented at the American
Association for Cancer Research show that a grocery list of vegetables
including ginger, hot peppers and cauliflower show promise as
cancer-combating agents.

Pharmacologist Shivendra Singh of the University of Pittsburgh and his
colleagues showed that a chemical released when cruciferous
vegetables--such as cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage--are chewed helps
control human prostate tumors grafted into mice.
Phenethyl-isothiocyanate, or PEITC, prompted the prostate cancer cells
to kill themselves in a process called apoptosis. By the end of a
31-day treatment cycle, treated mice had tumors nearly two times
smaller than their counterparts.

Fellow University of Pittsburgh pharmacologist Sanjay Srivastava and
his colleagues found that capsaicin--the chemical that makes hot
peppers hot--induced apoptosis in mice with human pancreatic cancer, an
aggressive and usually fatal disease. Treated mice had tumors half the
size of their untreated peers. "Capsaicin triggered the cancerous cells
to die off and significantly reduced the size of the tumors,"
Srivastava says.

Finally, at the same meeting, obstetrician J. Rebecca Liu of the
University of Michigan and her colleagues reported that ginger powder,
roughly the same as that sold in supermarkets, killed ovarian cancer
cells in vitro both by triggering apoptosis and inducing them to
cannibalize themselves, a phenomenon known as autophagy. "Most ovarian
cancer patients develop recurrent disease that eventually becomes
resistant to standard chemotherapy, which is associated with resistance
to apoptosis," Liu explains. "If ginger can cause autophagic death in
addition to apoptosis, it may circumvent [that] resistance."

"Patients are using natural products either in place of or in
conjunction with chemotherapy and we don't know if they work or how
they work," Liu adds. "There's no good clinical data." To that end,
these new findings may well be seeds of change. --David Biello

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