People with plenty of a B-vitamin in their blood appear to be at a reduced risk of lung cancer, even if they smoke, a European study suggests.
High levels of Vitamin B6 and the amino acid methionine cut the risk by half, a study of 400,000 people suggested.
These occur naturally in nuts, fish and meat or can be taken as supplements.
But experts told the Journal of the American Medical Association that stopping smoking remained the best way of reducing lung cancer risk.
And, as yet, it is too early to say that taking vitamins would provide any extra protection, they say.
Higher vitamin levels could simply reflect healthier lifestyles.
Lung cancer is the most common form of the disease in the world and 90 per cent of all cases are caused by cigarette smoking. It kills 1.2 million people a year.
Around one in 10 smokers develop lung cancer – although they often die of other smoking-related causes like heart disease, stroke or emphysema. Lung cancer is also known to kill people who never smoked or who gave up years ago.
The IARC study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It looked at around 900 people with lung cancer and found a link to low levels of vitamin B6 and an amino acid called methionine, which occur naturally in nuts, fish and meat.
Even if the results in the new study are real, it remains unclear whether vitamin supplements could provide the same protection as food sources of vitamin B6 and methionine — or whether natural sources of these compounds would work better, Colditz says. Vitamin B6 is found in beans, grains, meat, poultry, fish and to some extent in fruits and vegetables. The main sources of methionine are animal products, with fruits and vegetables providing less.
In any case, the authors note, further clarification that vitamin B6 actively prevents lung cancer — even in smokers — should not “detract from the importance of reducing the numbers of individuals who smoke tobacco.”
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June 16th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
People with high levels of a vitamin found in meat, potatoes, fish and whole grains have half the risk of developing lung cancer, irrespective of whether they smoke.
The finding, from the largest study of the link between diet and cancer in the world, suggests that the risk of lung cancer might be dramatically affected by the food we eat.
Smoking causes eight out of 10 cases of lung cancer, which is the commonest cause of cancer death in the world. Many of the deaths occur among people who have stopped smoking but whose risk remains high. If this could be reduced by changes to the diet, thousands of lives might be saved.
Researchers from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) identified 900 people with lung cancer from among 500,000 European volunteers participating in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study, the largest data study into diet and nutrition in the world. The volunteers were recruited in 10 European countries, between 1992 and 2000.
The 900 lung cancer patients were compared with almost 1,800 people who did not have cancer. Blood tests showed people with above average levels of vitamin B6 had less than half the risk of developing lung cancer.
A lower risk was also seen among those with high levels of the amino acid methionine, found in similar foods. The results are reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Paul Brennan, of IARC, said: “At the moment we don’t know if this is a causal effect. It is a very strong, quite obvious effect and we have tried to eliminate all possible biases but it could be a marker for an underlying cause that is probably dietary. We see the effect in every country – it is consistent across Europe.”
He rejected suggestions that people should take supplements to boost levels of the vitamin. “We have had several bad experiences in the past with supplements. Twenty years ago, beta-carotene was given to people with lung cancer and found to increase, not decrease, deaths. I doubt if trials with supplements will go ahead.”
Previous research has suggested that deficiencies in B vitamins may increase the risk of DNA damage and subsequent gene mutations. Low levels of B vitamins are common in Western populations.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/meat-and-potato-diet-reduces-risk-of-lung-cancer-by-half-2001625.html
October 4th, 2010 at 12:21 am
Race does not appear to play a role in how long a black patient or a white patient with lung cancer will ultimately survive the disease, researchers report.
“In simple terms, if 100 patients who are [white] and 100 patients who are [black] have the same age, stage of cancer, type of lung cancer and are treated the same way, there should not be differences in their survival just because they are of different races,” Dr. Rajesh Sehgal, a medical oncologist at the Edwards Comprehensive Cancer Center in Huntington, W. Va., said in a news release from the American Association for Cancer Research.
“[Black] patients did have lesser median overall survival, but after compensating for all other factors that affect prognosis, such as age, stage and type of treatment, [black] race was not an independent prognostic factor for poor survival,” added Sehgal, who is also an assistant professor of medicine at the Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine.
The study also indicated patients of other races or ethnic groups — including Asian and Hispanic patients — had a slightly better disease prognosis when compared with African-American and white patients, indicating there may be biological differences in the tumors in these groups of people, the study authors said.
Sehgal’s team was scheduled to present their observations Saturday at the American Association for Cancer Research Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities, held this week in Miami.
The study authors gleaned their findings from data drawn from the Cancer Information Resource File, which included more than 130,500 patients who had been diagnosed with lung cancer between 2003 and 2008.
A little more than 91 percent of the patients were white, 6.5 percent were black, and 2.1 percent were “other,” the researchers noted.
Being male and older than 70 were factors that appeared to be linked to a poorer prognosis overall, the investigators found, and black patients were more likely to receive their diagnosis before they reached age 70 than were white patients (67 percent versus 54 percent, respectively).
Radiation therapy improved outcomes, and those with a particular form of non-small cell lung cancer (known as bronchoalveolar lung cancer) did better than other lung cancer patients. In addition, patients who received chemotherapy had a 43 percent higher survival rate than those who didn’t, while surgery offered a 60 percent survival boost, according to information in the news release.
Black patients were found to be less likely to have surgery than white patients, and more likely to have their illness diagnosed when their cancer had already spread.
That said, the authors concluded that the slight difference in survival rates between blacks and whites was not attributable to race. On average, they found that white patients survived about 10 months after diagnosis while black survival rates hovered around nine months. The survival rate was 11.8 months for patients of other races, the study authors said.
“If possible, we would like to look in to the tumor biology of ‘other’ races to see when differences exist in their tumors as compared to [white] and [black] patients, and whether these differences might account for their better prognosis,” Sehgal said.