N-acetyl-cysteine (NAC): good for some things but dangerous with cancer.

High grade soft tissue sarcomas in one study exhibit high levels of glutathione, especially after Doxirubicin therapy.  This is my situation exactly.  Link to the study here. 

The article below comes from Jacob Schor a Naturopath specializing in cancer.  

NAC is the precursor to a chemical called glutathione.  Oral NAC is rapidly taken up by the body and quickly converted to glutathione.

Glutathione is the primary antioxidant within all of our cells.  It protects our cells from oxidative damage.  This is a good thing in healthy cells; we prefer that they are not damaged.  But in cancer cells we prefer the opposite.  We want cancer cells to be extra vulnerable to damage.  Cancer cells generate oxidative chemicals referred to in total as reactive oxygen species (ROS) in an attempt to destroy themselves.  Glutathione acts as a brake and prevents them from self-destruction or to use the scientific term, apoptosis. 

Raising glutathione stops cancer cell death. 

Most cancer therapies work to kill cancer cells by increasing the levels of reactive oxygen species within the cancer cells.  This includes radiation therapy, most chemotherapies and most natural therapies. 

Providing cancer cells with NAC, because it will increase glutathione, protects the cancer cells and prevents them from dying. 

We often see NAC being used in studies investigating the mechanisms of how anticancer agents work; they use NAC in a simple trick to see if the drugs are killing cancer cells through the common mechanism of increasing reactive oxygen species.  If adding NAC stops the action of the anticancer agent, than it is assumed it was acting through oxidative action.  Let me find a recent example.

In April 2010, Korean researchers reported on the action of NAC in combination with a proteosome inhibiting chemotherapy drug known as MG132.

 First they showed that MG132 increased the amounts of ROS in lung cancer cells and as expected, the drug slowed the rate of growth of the cancer cells. Then they treated the cancer cells with NAC.  The drug no longer slowed growth rates.  

The procedures followed in this study were not novel. They are routine when evaluating chemotherapy drugs.  First, measure how well the drug works against tumor cells and then measure whether NAC stops the effect.  This tells the scientists to what degree the drug’s action is via reactive oxygen species generation and whether other anti-cancer mechanisms are involved.

It’s not just the medical treatments that NAC will potentially interfere with.  A paper from December 2010 tells us that NAC ‘blocked the antiproliferative’ effect of curcumin, that is stopped it from hindering the growth of cancer cells. 

For the whole story click on the title to follow the link.

'I'm a tumor and I'm over here!' Nanovaults used to prod immune system to fight cancer

By Kim Irwin and Jennifer Marcus May 03, 2011

Nanovaults

UCLA scientists have discovered a way to "wake up" the immune system to fight cancer by delivering an immune system–stimulating protein in a nanoscale container called a vault directly into lung cancer tumors. The new method harnesses the body's natural defenses to fight disease growth.

The vaults, barrel-shaped nanoscale capsules found in the cytoplasm of all mammalian cells, were engineered to slowly release a protein — the chemokine CCL21 — into tumors. Pre-clinical studies in mice with lung cancer showed that the protein stimulated the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells, potently inhibiting cancer growth, according to the study's co-senior author Leonard Rome, a researcher at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and associate director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA.

"Researchers have been working for many years to develop effective immune therapies to treat cancer, with limited success," said Rome, who has been studying vaults for decades. "In lung tumors, the immune system is down-regulated, and what we wanted to do was wake it up, find a way to have the cancer say to the immune system, 'Hey, I'm a tumor and I'm over here. Come get me.' "

The study appears in the May 3 issue of PLoS One, a peer-reviewed journal of the Public Library of Science.

Waking up the immune system

The new vault delivery system, which Rome characterized as "just a dream" three years ago, is based on a 10-year, ongoing research effort focused on using a patient's white blood cells to create dendritic cells, which are immune system cells that process antigen material and present it on their surface to other immune cells known as T cells, stimulating a response. 

Interview With Alternative Cancer Doctor Nicholas Gonzalez

This is an interview of noted cancer specialist Nicholas Gonzalez by Joseph Mercola.  Dr. Gonzalez uses a system of metabolic typing diets, juicing, coffee enemas to detox colon and liver and very high doses of pancreatic enzymes.  The history of the development of this story is fascinating.  

Dr. Mercola's Comments:

Alternative cancer treatments are a kind of "forbidden area" in medicine, but Dr. Gonzalez chose to go that route anyway, and has some remarkable success stories to show for his pioneering work.
He didn't set out to treat cancer at first however, let alone treat patients. His original plan was to be a basic science researcher at Sloan-Kettering; a teaching hospital for Cornell Medical College. He had a chance meeting with William Kelley, a controversial dentist who was one of the founders of nutritional typing. Dr. Kelley had been practicing alternative- and nutritional approaches for over two decades at the time, led him to begin a student project investigation of Kelley's work, in the summer of 1981.

"I started going through his records and even though I was just a second year medical student, I could see right away there were cases that were extraordinary," he says. "Patients with appropriately diagnosed pancreatic cancer, metastatic breast cancer in the bone, metastatic colorectal cancer… who were alive 5, 10, 15 years later under Kelley's care with a nutritional approach."

This preliminary review led to a formal research study, which Dr. Gonzalez completed while doing his fellowship in cancer, immunology and bone marrow transplantation.

The "Impossible" Recoveries of Dr. Kelley's Cancer Patients

After going through thousands of Kelley's records, Dr. Gonzalez put together a monograph, divided into three sections:

1. Kelley’s theory
2. 50 cases of appropriately-diagnosed lethal cancer patients still alive five to 15 years after diagnosis, whose long-term survival was attributed to Kelley’s program
3. Patients Kelley had treated with pancreatic cancer between the years 1974 and 1982

According to Dr. Good, the president of Sloan-Kettering who had become Gonzalez' mentor, if Kelley could produce even one patient with appropriately diagnosed pancreatic cancer who was alive 5-10 years later, it would be remarkable. They ultimately tracked down 22 of Kelley's cases. Ten of them met him once and didn't do the program after being dissuaded by family members or doctors who thought Kelley was a quack.
The average survival for that group was about 60 days.
A second group of seven patients who did the therapy partially and incompletely (again, dissuaded by well-intentioned but misguided family members or doctors), had an average survival of 300 days.
The third group consisting of five patients, who were appropriately diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer and who completed the full program, had an average survival of eight and a half years! In Dr. Gonzalez' words, this was "just unheard of in medicine."
One of those patients included a woman diagnosed by the Mayo Clinic with stage four pancreatic cancer who had been given six months to live. She'd learned about Kelley's program through a local health food store. She completed his treatment and is still alive today, 29 years later.

Total Video Length: 1:42:22
Download Interview Transcript

In looking around the internet I found a clinic that gives a basic rundown of what Dr. Gonzalez is doing.
http://www.aspenintegrativemedicine.com/?q=node/49

Dr. Kelley's original book is online here
http://www.drkelley.com/CANLIVER55.html







 

Meats Not To Eat

You might have missed the media headlines last month which extolled hotdogs as better for you than chicken. If you click on the Time Magazine link above you can get a taste of this nonsense. This is a perfect example of how taking too narrow-minded a view can lead you astray from the truth about what's healthy and what's not.
Here, the researchers measured several different types of meats for levels of heterocyclic amines (HCAs), and because hot dogs and pepperoni happened to have lower levels of HCAs than rotisserie chicken, MSNBC leapt to the conclusion that these processed meats are better for you because they're "relatively free of carcinogenic compounds."
WRONG! They're just relatively lower in ONE type of carcinogenic compound! But hot dogs and other processed meats contain OTHER compounds that put them squarely on the list of foods to avoid or eliminate entirely...

Researchers Create Better Ways to Spot Cancer Cells

Cancer can be notoriously difficult to spot, so scientists are working to develop new techniques to better detect tumors in the body. Such tools could potentially identify cancer cells more reliably and earlier than currently available methods, such as mammography, biopsies and magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI. Improved detection methods could help speed up treatment decisions and monitor whether a therapy is working.

The Root Cause of Cancer Almost Universally Ignored by Doctors...

In 1971 President Nixon and Congress declared war on cancer. So what's happened in the 40 years since? After weeding out the hype and filling in the actual statistics, it turns out, not much.

"These summary statistics show that the war on cancer has not gone well," says the article's author, Reynold Spector. "This is in marked contrast to death rates from stroke and cardiovascular disease (adjusted for the age and size of the population), which have fallen by 74 percent and 64 percent, respectively, from 1950 through 2006; and by 60 percent and 52 percent, respectively, from 1975 through 2006 (Kolata 2009a).
Cancer therapy is clearly decades behind."

Further down the article.  Dr. Mercola writes:  

Getting to the Root of the Problem

I strongly believe the cancer rates are escalating because they are in no way shape or form addressing the underlying cause of most cancers. Instead, most of the research is directed towards expensive drugs that target late stages of the disease and greatly enrich the drug companies but simply do not prevent cancer.
If ever there was an area in which an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure it is cancer. I strongly believe that if you are able to work your way up to the advanced health plan, that you will virtually eliminate the risk of most cancers.
Environmental- and lifestyle factors are increasingly being pinpointed as the primary culprits fueling our cancer epidemic.

 

Association of Integrative Oncology and Chinese Medicine

I and colleagues from many parts of the world are interested in creating a Society of Chinese Medicine practitioners interested in Integrative Oncology.  The endeavor to bring this Society to life is about creating community, and organizing standards and competencies and then teaching to those standards. 

For more information about the AIOCM click here. 

Mechanism for Link Between High Fat Diet and Risk of Prostate Cancer and Disorders Unveiled

ScienceDaily (July 16, 2010) — Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men with an estimated 192,280 new cases diagnosed in the US in 2009. Diet is considered one of the most important controllable risk factors for inflammation and prostate diseases including benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), prostatitis, and prostate cancer.

Sanjay Gupta, MS, PhD, Carter Kissell associate professor & research director in the Department of Urology and associate professor in the Department of Nutrition in the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, and his team of post-doctoral fellows have focused on understanding the mechanisms of the deleterious effects of a high fat diet on the prostate. Previously, Dr. Gupta's team demonstrated that nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB), a protein complex that controls DNA transcription which is activated as a result of inflammation and stress, is constitutively activate in human prostate adenocarcinoma and is related to tumor progression (Shukla S et al, Neoplasia, 2004).
In a new study published in the journal The Prostate, Dr. Gupta and his team demonstrate that a high fat diet results in activation of NF-κB in the abdominal cavity, thymus, spleen, and prostate. Non-obese NF-κB reporter mice were fed a high fat diet for four, eight, and 12 weeks. Compared with mice fed a regular diet, the high fat diet group had significant increases in prostate weight, and in the prostate expression of markers of oxidative stress (such as NADPH), and inflammation (such as the downstream targets of NF-κB: nitric oxide synthase, and cyclooxygenase [COX-2]) were increased. These studies provide direct evidence that a high fat diet causes proliferation, inflammation, and oxidative stress that can lead to benign prostatic hyperplasia, prostatitis, and cancer of the prostate, some of the most common disorders affecting adult men.
"Our studies provide evidence that a high-fat diet increases the activation of NF-κB along with elevated levels of NADPH oxidase components which might lead to intraprostatic inflammation. This study strengthens the link between a high-fat diet -- typical of "Western style" high fat diet -- as a potential cause of prostatic diseases including BPG and prostate cancer," said Dr. Gupta.
This work was supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and the Sullivan Foundation for the Study of Prostatitis.

Alex's note:  There are plenty of natural products to control NF-κB 

CHANGING LIFESTYLE CHANGES GENE EXPRESSION A Talk with Dean Ornish

[DEAN ORNISH:] For the last 30 years or so, I have directed a series of clinical research studies proving that the simple choices that we make in our lives each day can have a powerful impact on our health and our well being, and much more quickly than had once been thought possible, even at a cellular level. Ironically, we have been using very high tech, expensive, state of the art measures to prove how powerful very simple and low tech and often ancient interventions can be.


Our prostate study was a randomized control trial of men who had biopsy proven prostate cancer and who have elected not to be treated conventionally for reasons unrelated to our study. What made this interesting from a scientific standpoint is that we could take men who knew they had cancer from biopsies, randomly divide them into two groups, and have a true non-intervention control group so we could determine the effects of comprehensive lifestyle changes alone without being confounded by other treatments. You can't do that with breast cancer because almost everybody gets treated right away, so you don't know if any improvements were due to the lifestyle changes or the chemo or the radiation or the surgery.
After a year we found that PSA levels, a marker for prostate cancer, went up (worsened) in the comparison or control group, but went down significantly (improved) in the experimental group that made the lifestyle changes we recommended. The degree of change in lifestyle was directly correlated with the degree of change in their PSA levels.
We also found that the prostate tumor growth in vitro was inhibited 70 percent in the group that made these changes compared to only nine percent in the group that didn't. The inhibition of the tumor growth was itself a direct function of the degree of change in lifestyle. In other words, the more people changed, the more it directly inhibited the growth of their prostate tumors.
J. Craig Venter has shown that one way you can change your genes is by making new ones. We are finding that another way you can change your gene expression is simply by changing your lifestyle.
In May of this year, we published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Craig was the communicating editor). We found that changing lifestyle actually changes gene expression. In only three months, we found that over 500 genes were either up-regulated or down-regulated—in simple terms, turning on genes that prevent many chronic diseases, and turning off genes that cause coronary heart disease, oncogenes that are linked to breast and prostate cancer, genes that promote inflammation and oxidative stress and so on. 

Is Cancer a Man Made Disease?

Alex's note:  This group of articles I found on one hand disturbing and on the other enlightening.  Wow!  This is the toxic world we live in! But there is a lot we can do to prevent cancer and that is the important take away message.  Once you need heroic measures like chemo. and radiation things have progressed.  It is always better to cut the grass while it is still short.  However since my grass was not cut that way (I got cancer).  It has become a life transforming event and I am dedicated to understanding cancer and its prevention.

A study of ancient bodies has determined that cancer is a man-made disease, one fueled by the excesses. Tumors turn out to be extremely rare until very recent times, when pollution and poor diet became issues.
Researchers analyzed potential references to the disease in classical literature, and also searched for signs in the fossil record and in mummified bodies. But despite examining tissue from hundreds of Egyptian mummies, they confirmed only one case of cancer
According to the Daily Mail:

"Dismissing the argument that the ancient Egyptians didn't live long enough to develop cancer, the researchers pointed out that other age-related disease such as hardening of the arteries and brittle bones did occur ...
Fossil evidence of cancer is also sparse, with scientific literature providing a few dozen, mostly disputed, examples in animal fossil".

Sources:

  Daily Mail October 15, 2010

  Nature Reviews Cancer October 2010; 10: 728-733

  Cancer September 1977; 40(3): 1358-1362