Prostate Cancer Medical Breakthroughs
December 15, 2009
NaturalNews
by S. L. Baker
Founded in 1907, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) is the world’s oldest and largest organization dedicated to advancing cancer research. So when its members (comprised of cancer researchers, oncologists and other health care professionals) meet for a national conference, research about the latest advancements in fighting cancer is announced and discussed. That’s what happened at the recent AACR Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference, held in Houston. And three of the most hopeful new studies about preventing and treating prostate cancer all had something in common — they involved totally natural therapies.
For starters, German scientists presented research showing that hops could play a role in preventing prostate cancer. Hops, the flowering clusters of the plant known to botanists as Humulus lupulus, are not only used as a flavoring agent in beer and other beverages, but they have long been used as a traditional herbal medicine. Previous studies have found that a specific phytochemical called xanthohumol in hops binds to estrogen receptors and may prevent breast cancer. Because testosterone receptors act similarly to estrogen receptors, scientists have theorized the natural hops compound might also bind to testosterone receptors and fight prostate cancer.
So, in order to study the impact of xanthohumol on prostate cancer, a research team headed by Clarissa Gerhauser, Ph.D., the group leader of cancer chemoprevention in the Division of Epigenomics and Cancer Risk Factors at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, worked with hormone-dependent prostate cancer cells in the lab. First they stimulated the cells with testosterone. This created a huge excess of prostate specific antigen (PSA), which is associated with prostate cancer in men.
But when prostate cancer cells were treated with testosterone and xanthohumol, the hops phyotchemical inhibited the secretion of PSA and blocked other hormone-dependent actions that spur cancer growth. In fact, molecular testing showed that xanthohumol directly binds to the male hormone receptor structure.
“We hope that one day we can demonstrate that xanthohumol prevents prostate cancer development, first in animal models and then in humans, but we are just at the beginning,” Dr. Gerhauser said in a statement to the media.
Anti-cancer properties of coffee
Another natural substance also was in the spotlight at the Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Conference — coffee. In the first study of its kind, Harvard scientists found a strong association between drinking coffee and a lowered risk of the most aggressive and deadly forms of prostate cancer.
