Cancer, Cancer Treatment

A study that was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that vitamin B supplements did not protect people taking them from developing cancer, although past research has suggested it did have the aforementioned effect.

Lead author of the study Dr. Shumin Zhang of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, along with his team, looked at 5,442 female health-care professionals throughout the United States, all of whom had been taking a supplement including vitamins B6, B12 and B9 (also known as folic acid) daily over a period of about seven and a half years.

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- Taking vitamin E and vitamin C supplements may not make cancer less likely, a new study shows.

That finding comes from the Physicians’ Health Study II, which recently showed that taking vitamin C and vitamin E supplements may not lower the risk of heart attack or stroke.

Researchers have now analyzed study data on cancer risk and found no sign of lower cancer risk in people taking vitamin E and vitamin C supplements daily during the study.

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Thursday October 30, 2008, 2008 (foodconsumer.org) — A study sponsored by the National Cancer Institute found that supplementation of vitamin E and selenium may do more harm than good in men with regard to the risk of prostate cancer.

The Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT) showed that taking vitamin E or selenium supplements or combination of the two did not seem to reduce the risk of developing prostate cancer in men age 50.

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A colon cancer cell isn’t a lost cause. Vitamin D can tame the rogue cell by adjusting everything from its gene expression to its cytoskeleton.

In the Nov. 17 issue of the Journal of Cell Biology, Ordonez-Morn et al. show that one pathway governs the vitamin’s diverse effects. The results help clarify the actions of a molecule that is undergoing clinical trials as a cancer therapy.

Vitamin D stymies colon cancer cells in two ways. It switches on genes such as the one that encodes E-cadherin, a component of the adherens junctions that anchor cells in epithelial layers. The vitamin also induces effects on the cytoskeleton that are required for gene regulation and short-circuiting the Wnt/b-catenin pathway, which is overactive in most colon tumors. The net result is to curb division and prod colon cancer cells to differentiate into epithelial cells that settle down instead of spreading.

A large government study of whether Vitamin E and selenium protect men against prostate cancer has been suspended, federal health officials announced yesterday, after an independent analysis determined that the nutrients did not reduce the risk for the common malignancy.

The $119 million study, involving more than 35,000 men, also found hints that the nutrients might increase the risk for prostate cancer and diabetes, although officials stressed that those findings may be a coincidence.

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SUNDAY, Nov. 16 — Coming on the heels of two studies discounting the usefulness of vitamin B, folic acid, vitamin D and calcium supplements for cancer prevention, U.S. researchers report that vitamins C and E supplements won’t help prevent cancer, either.

The same team also recently reported that vitamin C and E supplements weren’t helpful in protecting users against heart disease.

“At least in the context of two very common outcomes — cardioprotection and chemoprevention — we see no compelling evidence to take vitamin E or C supplements,” said one of the study’s authors, Dr. Howard Sesso, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

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The best-known example of vitamin D deficiency is rickets, a bone-softening disease that can result in bowed legs and fractures, but a burgeoning body of evidence links vitamin D deficiency with an array of serious ailments. New research shows it plays a role in certain cancers, autoimmune diseases, and even diabetes.

That’s why today the American Academy of Pediatrics is set to announce it is doubling the amount of vitamin D it recommends for infants, children, and adolescents to 400 IU a day, beginning in the first few days of life.

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A study that was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that vitamin B supplements did not protect people taking them from developing cancer, although past research has suggested it did have the aforementioned effect.

Lead author of the study Dr. Shumin Zhang of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, along with his team, looked at 5,442 female health-care professionals throughout the United States, all of whom had been taking a supplement including vitamins B6, B12 and B9 (also known as folic acid) daily over a period of about seven and a half years.

Read the rest of this entry »

The National Cancer Institute has announced its decision to suspend a study on the benefits of vitamin E and selenium supplements treatments on prostate cancer prevention. The study, called SELECT (Selenium and vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial), involved more than 35,000 men and was conducted at 400 sites around the United States.

Researchers found a higher risk for aggressive prostate cancer in participants taking only vitamin E and a small increased risk of developing diabetes in subjects taking only selenium. The researchers cautioned that those effects may have been due to chance and they were not statistically significant.

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