First Trial to Prove a Diet Supplement Can Prevent Hereditary Cancer

AHA Publisher — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 07:00:57 +0000

Newcastle University via Newswise – A trial in people with high hereditary risk of a wide range of cancers has shown a major preventive effect from resistant starch, found in a wide range of foods such as oats, breakfast cereal, cooked and cooled pasta or rice, peas and beans and slightly green bananas. An international trial – known as CAPP2 – involved almost 1000 patients with Lynch syndrome from around the world and revealed that a regular dose of resistant starch, also known as fermentable fibre, taken for an average of two years, did not affect cancers in the bowel but did reduce cancers in other parts of the body by more than half. This effect was particularly pronounced for upper gastrointestinal cancers including oesophageal, gastric, biliary tract, pancreatic and duodenum cancers. The astonishing effect was seen to last for 10 years after stopping taking the supplement. The study, led by experts at the Universities of Newcastle and Leeds, published today in Cancer Prevention Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, is a planned double blind 10 year follow–up, supplemented with comprehensive national cancer registry data for up to 20 years in 369 of the participants. Previous research published as part of the same trial, revealed that aspirin reduced cancer of the large bowel by 50%. “We found that resistant starch reduces a range of cancers by over 60%. The effect was most obvious in the upper part of the gut,” explained Professor John Mathers, professor of Human Nutrition at Newcastle University. “This is important as cancers of the upper GI tract are difficult to diagnose and often are not caught early on. “Resistant starch can be taken as a powder supplement and is found naturally in peas, beans, oats and other starchy foods. The dose used in the trial is equivalent to eating a daily banana; before they become too ripe and soft, the starch in bananas resists breakdown and reaches the bowel where it can change the type of bacteria that live there. “Resistant starch is a type of carbohydrate that isn’t digested in your small intestine, instead it ferments in your large intestine, feeding beneficial gut bacteria – it acts in effect, like dietary fibre in your digestive system. This type of starch has several health benefits and fewer calories than regular starch. We think that resistant starch may reduce cancer development by changing the bacterial metabolism of bile acids and to reduce those types of bile acids that can damage our DNA and eventually cause cancer. However, this needs further research.” Professor Sir John Burn, from Newcastle University and Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust who ran the trial with Professor Mathers, said: “When we started the studies over 20 years ago, we thought that people with a genetic predisposition to colon cancer could help us to test whether we could reduce the risk of cancer with either aspirin or resistant starch. “Patients with Lynch syndrome are high risk as they are more likely to develop cancers so finding that aspirin can reduce the risk of large bowel cancers and resistant starch other cancers by half is vitally important. “Based on our trial, NICE now recommend Aspirin for people at high genetic risk of cancer, the benefits are clear – aspirin and resistant starch work.” Long Term Study Between 1999 and 2005, nearly 1000 participants began either taking resistant starch in a powder form every day for two years or aspirin or a placebo. At the end of the treatment stage, there was no overall difference between those who had taken resistant starch or aspirin and those who had not. However, the research team anticipated a longer-term effect and designed the study for further follow-up. In the period of follow-up, there were just 5 new cases of upper GI cancers among the 463 participants who had taken the resistant starch compared with 21 among the 455 who were on the placebo. The team are now leading the international trial, CaPP3, with more than 1,800 people with Lynch syndrome enrolled to look at whether smaller, safer doses of aspirin can be used to help reduce the cancer risk. The research is funded by Cancer Research UK, the European Commission, Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health Research. To read the original article click here.

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Researchers Identify New Genetic Tool That Can Help Treat Certain Cancers

AHA Publisher — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 07:00:30 +0000

University of California-San Diego via News-Medical Net – With advances in genome sequencing, cancer treatments have increasingly sought to leverage the idea of “synthetic lethality,” exploiting cancer-specific genetic defects to identify targets that are uniquely essential to the survival of cancer cells. Synthetic lethality results when non-lethal mutations in different genes become deadly when combined in cells. In a new paper published online July 27, 2020, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers at the San Diego branch of Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and University of California San Diego School of Medicine report that inhibiting a key enzyme caused human cancer cells associated with two major types of breast and ovarian cancer to die and in mouse studies reduced tumor growth. The research team, led by senior study author Richard D. Kolodner, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Cellular and Molecular Medicine and member of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research San Diego Branch, studied Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a species of yeast used in basic research, to search for synthetic lethal relationships. They zeroed in on Flap Endonuclease 1 (FEN1), a DNA structure-specific endonuclease involved in DNA replication and repair. Turning their attention to cancer cells, they found that when they blocked functions of FEN1 using either a small molecule inhibitor or genetic ablation, BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutant cancer cell lines were preferentially killed. Notably, normal cells were able to recover from FEN1 inhibition. BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes normally act to prevent breast and ovarian cancer as well as other cancers, but when mutated, may cause a person to be more likely to develop breast or ovarian cancer or develop cancer at a younger age. Less than 10 percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer have a BRCA mutation, but it’s estimated that 55 to 65 percent of women with the BRCA1 mutation will develop breast cancer before age 70 while approximately 45 percent of women with a BRCA2 mutation will develop breast cancer by age 70, according to the National Breast Cancer Foundation. Similarly, women with inherited BRCA mutations have an increased risk of developing ovarian cancer and men with inherited BRCA mutations have increased risk of developing breast and prostate cancer. Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer in the United States, with approximately 276,000 new cases per year, according to the National Cancer Institute. Prostate cancer is the fourth most common, with 191,930 new cases and ovarian is 17th, with an estimated 21,750 new cases annually, according to the National Cancer Institute. Kolodner and colleagues then tested the approach in an immune-compromised mouse xenograft model, and found that FEN1 inhibition significantly reduced tumor growth. The researchers say their findings are significant in two ways: They underscore the value of using S. cerevisiae yeast as a genetics tool for discovering synthetic lethality relationships and identify FEN1 inhibitors as a possible therapeutic agent to further develop for treating certain cancers with targeted vulnerabilities. To read the original article click here.

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First Trial to Prove a Diet Supplement Can Prevent Hereditary Cancer

Researchers Identify New Genetic Tool That Can Help Treat Certain Cancers