Vitamin C May Interfere With Cancer Treatment - UNLESS USED IN HIGH DOSES

[Guest guest]

It's unfortunate that this type of partially true, inaccurate

information gets out in the press so often without the full picture

being presented.

While this might be true when vitamin C is employed at typical tablet

doses that are too low to fight cancer, the US government's top cancer

researcher Mark Levine says that vitamin C given in high doses, only

obtainable by giving vitamin C intravenously, can kill cancer cells.

Dr. Levine is in the process of completely government-funded new

studies on intravenous vitamin C's potential use for cancer therapy.

See: http://www.michaelmooney.net/AttemptingtomakethecaseforvitaminC.htm

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October 1, 2008, 9:46 am

Vitamin C May Interfere With Cancer Treatment

By Tara -Pope

Many people gobble big doses of vitamin C in hopes of boosting their

immune system and warding off illness. But new research shows that in

people with cancer, the vitamin may do more harm than good.

Researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York

studied the effects of vitamin C on cancer cells. As it turns out, the

vitamin seems to protect not just healthy cells, but cancer cells,

too. The findings were published today in the journal Cancer Research.

" The use of vitamin C supplements could have the potential to reduce

the ability of patients to respond to therapy, " said Dr. Mark Heaney,

an associate attending physician at the cancer center.

Dr. Heaney and his colleagues tested five different chemotherapy drugs

on cancer cells in the laboratory. Some of the cells were first

treated with vitamin C. In every case, including a test of the

powerful new cancer drug Gleevec, chemotherapy did not work as well if

cells had been exposed to vitamin C. The chemotherapy agents killed 30

to 70 percent fewer cancer cells when the cells were treated with the

vitamin.

A second set of experiments implanted cancer cells in mice. They found

that the tumors grew more rapidly in mice that were given cancer cells

pretreated with vitamin C.

The researchers found that just like healthy cells, cancer cells also

benefit from vitamin C. The vitamin appeared to repair a cancer cell's

damaged mitochondria, the energy center of cells. When the

mitochondria is injured, it sends signals that force the cell to die,

but vitamin C interrupts that process.

" Vitamin C appears to protect the mitochondria from extensive damage,

thus saving the cell, " Dr. Heaney said. " And whether directly or not,

all anticancer drugs work to disrupt the mitochondria to push cell death. "

Dr. Heaney measured the buildup of vitamin C levels in cells and said

that the levels of vitamin C used in the experiments were similar to

those that would result if a patient took large doses of the vitamin

in supplement form. Earlier research at the cancer center showed that

vitamin C seems to accumulate within cancer cells more than in normal

cells.

Patients should eat a healthy diet that includes foods rich in vitamin

C, Dr. Heaney said, but it's the large doses of vitamin C in tablet

form that are worrisome.