Eating a spicy curry may help in the fight against bowel and colon cancers, according to an international team of scientists.
Curcumin, which is present in the spice turmeric, has already proven it can beat cancer cells in the laboratory, and now the first human trials are to start at a hospital in England.
Professor Will Stewart from England's University of Leicester first became aware of the medicinal properties of curry when he found Indian and Pakistani communities in Leicester had 70 per cent less chance of contracting bowel or colon cancer.
"We've done a lot of work with curcumin ... and we've shown that it has well over 100 mechanisms of damaging cancer cells, particularly colon cancer cells," he said.
"One of the major mechanisms is affecting the way that they grow blood vessels into themselves."
Professor Stewart is leading an international team to test the power of curry on 40 patients with advanced bowel cancer at Leicester General Hospital.
They are being given two capsules of curcumin a day - equivalent to eating two large curries.
"In sequential patients we're increasing the amount of curcumin they get with their chemotherapy to test that it doesn't cause any side effects," he said.
"So far it hasn't, and the aim is to see whether we shrink the cancer in a greater percentage and a greater frequency than has been our experience with chemotherapy alone."
Researchers hope curcumin will vastly increase the effectiveness of chemotherapy while at the same time reducing its adverse side effects.
Professor Stewart says trials on animals have already shown significant results.
"We've got an animal model of developing colon cancer where we reduce the development of colon cancer by around about 60 per cent in those animals, just with curcumin alone," he said.
"And then we've gone on to look at established cancer, treating them with the chemotherapy drug alone, with the curcumin alone, or with both together and with both together we've increased the killing of cancer cells, colon cancer cells, by well over 100-fold."
Bowel cancer is more common in the Western world than in developing nations, and Australia has one of the highest rates of the disease.
The trial may offer hope to 14,000 Australians who are diagnosed with the disease every year.
sumber dari: http://www.abc.net.au/news
