Antioxidants Increase The Spread Of Cancer Among Patients, According To New Study.

A recent study found that cancer cells actually benefit more from antioxidants than normal cells, which is now raising concerns about the use of dietary antioxidants by cancer patients, according to a news release.

A team of scientists at the Children's Research Institute at UT Southwestern (CRI) conducted a study with specialized mice that had been transplanted with melanoma cells from patients. Previous studies showed that the metastasis of human melanoma cells in these mice is predictive of their metastasis in patients.

Melanoma is a cancer that starts in a certain type of skin cell, and is often black, brown, or tan and they appear like skin tags on the surface of the body. Metastasis refers is the process by which cancer cells spreads from a place at which it first arose as a primary-tumor to distant locations in the body, which eventually leads to the death of many cancer patients.

In their experiment, the CRI researchers found that the cancer spread quicker in mice that received antioxidants than in the mice that did not receive antioxidants.

"Administration of antioxidants to the mice allowed more of the metastasizing melanoma cells to survive, increasing metastatic disease burden," said Dr. Sean Morrison, CRI Director and Mary McDermott Cook Chair in Pediatric Genetics at UT Southwestern Medical Center. "The idea that antioxidants are good for you has been so strong that there have been clinical trials done in which cancer patients were administered antioxidants."

"Some of those trials had to be stopped because the patients getting the antioxidants were dying faster. Our data suggest the reason for this: cancer cells benefit more from antioxidants than normal cells do," Morrison added.

Persons who are healthy and cancer-free benefit from antioxidants, which help reduce damage from reactive oxidative molecules in the body.

The study's results have not been tested on humans as yet, however, they raise concerns that cancer should be treated with pro-oxidants and cancer patients' diet should not include large amounts of antioxidants, according to the researchers.

"This finding also opens up the possibility that when treating cancer, we should test whether increasing oxidative stress through the use of pro-oxidants would prevent metastasis," said Morrison. "One potential approach is to target the folate pathway that melanoma cells use to survive oxidative stress, which would increase the level of oxidative stress in the cancer cells."

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