By Rachel B
Vitamin C helps to boost the immune system, and as the weather gets colder many people will be taking in large doses in hopes of avoiding illness. However, researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center have found that not only does it help boost the immune system of regular cells, but cancer cells as well. Five different chemotherapy drugs were tested in the laboratory, including a powerful new drug called Gleevec and in each case chemo was not as effective if the cells were exposed to vitamin C, killing 30 to 70 cells fewer.
The Center also implanted cancer cells into mice to study this phenomenon on a more complex level and it was found that tumors in the mice grew much more rapidly if they were exposed to vitamin C. On a cellular level the vitamin appeared to repair damage in a cancer cell’s mitochondria, the energy source of the cell. Normally, if the mitochondria were damaged, it would send out signals to the cell to die, but vitamin C stops this process. Researchers explained that though cancer patients should eat a healthy diet including foods rich in the vitamin, tablets that consist of large doses of vitamin C should be avoided.
I thought this article was really interesting because we all try to get a lot of vitamin C to stay well, but in some cases it ends up doing more damage than help. It related well to class since we went over how the parts of a cell and how they contribute to the overall function of it and about what can go wrong in the ways of irregular cellular growth. This article also had a personal effect since I had an aunt who died of lung cancer and my grandma was treated for breast cancer.
SOURCE: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/vitamin-c-may-interfere-with-cancer-treatment/
