Chinese Mandarin - Study shows vitamin C's cancer-fighting properties

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WORLD / Health

Study shows vitamin C's cancer-fighting properties

(Reuters)
Updated: 2007-09-11 04:55

WASHINGTON, Sept 10 - Vitamin C can impede the growth of some types of
tumors although not in the way some scientists had suspected, researchers
reported on Monday.

The new research, published in the journal Cancer Cell, supported the
general notion that vitamin C and other so-called antioxidants can slow
tumor growth, but pointed to a mechanism different from the one many
experts had suspected.

The researchers generated encouraging results when giving vitamin C to
mice that had been implanted with human cancer cells -- either the blood
cancer lymphoma or prostate cancer. Another antioxidant,
N-acetylcysteine, also limited tumor growth in the mice, the researchers
said.

Antioxidants are nutrients that prevent some of the damage from unstable
molecules known as free radicals, created when the body turns food into
energy. Vitamin C, vitamin E and beta-carotene are among well-known
antioxidants.

Previous research had suggested that vitamin C may stifle tumor growth by
preventing DNA damage from free radicals.

But researchers led by Dr. Chi Dang, a professor of medicine and oncology
at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, found that antioxidants appear
to be working in a different way -- undermining a tumor's ability to grow
under certain conditions.

Figuring out how antioxidants impede tumors should help scientists figure
out how they might be harnessed to fight cancer, Dang said. In addition
to the cancer types involved in this study, others that might be
vulnerable to vitamin C include colon cancer and cervical cancer, he said.

Dang said more research is needed and cautioned against taking high doses
of vitamin C based on these findings.

"Certainly we would very much discourage people with untreated cancer to
go out and take buckets full of vitamin C," Dang said in a telephone
interview.

Linus Pauling argued in the 1970s that vitamin C, also called ascorbic
acid, could ward off cancer, but the notion has proved contentious.

Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry as well as the Nobel Peace
Prize, died in 1994.

"Pauling actually had some good evidence that under certain situations
vitamin C can prevent tumor formation. It's just the mechanism was really
not that clear then," Dang said.

"Now that, I think, we provide relatively compelling evidence of how this
works, maybe Pauling is partly right. We shouldn't dismiss him so
quickly." Dang added.

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