Plants may help prevent lung cancer
Published: November 25, 2005
TREATMENT with deguelin, a chemical found in various plants, may help prevent lung cancer caused by cigarette smoking, the results of an animal study suggest.
Dr Ho-Young Lee, from the University of Texas M D Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, and colleagues treated three groups of mice with cancer-causing agents found in cigarette smoke for eight weeks.
One group was treated with deguelin at the same time, another was treated with deguelin afterward, and the third group received no deguelin. [Medicinal Natural Products : A Biosynthetic Approach]
The animals were killed and examined at week 20.
Animals in all three groups developed lung tumours, the researchers reports in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
However, giving deguelin at the same time as the cancer-causing chemicals led to a marked reduction in the number of tumours. [How to Prevent and Treat Cancer with Natural Medicine]
Giving deguelin afterward also cut the number of tumours, but the difference was not significant from a statistical standpoint.
Although there are concerns that high doses of deguelin may be toxic to the heart, lungs, and nerves, the authors observed no major side effects with the doses used in their study.
These results, Dr Lee’s team writes, “indicate that deguelin warrants consideration as a (preventive) agent for early-stage lung” cancer in human studies.
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