Your Newspaper - Your Health

Posted on: March 4, 2009

The Pink Page

An Apple a Day ...

By Mirielle Cailles
CTW Features

When it comes to keeping the doctor away, apples may actually do the trick. Six recent studies have shown that increasing amounts of fresh apple extract had an inhibitory effect on the mammary tumors in rats. The study highlights the importance of phytochemicals, also known as phenolics, found in apples and other fruits and vegetables.

"We not only observed that the treated animals had fewer tumors, but the tumors were smaller, less malignant and grew more slowly compared with the tumors in the untreated rats," says Rui Hai Liu, Cornell University associate professor of food science and a member of Cornell's Institute for Comparative and Environmental Toxicology, Ithaca, N.Y.

Results showed that compared to the 81 percent of the control group that developed adenocarcinoma, a highly malignant tumor and the main cause of death for breast cancer patients, rats fed either low, medium or high amounts of apple extracts - the equivalent of either one, three or six apples a day in humans - only developed the tumor 57, 50 and 23 percent of the time respectively.

"These studies add to the growing evidence that increased consumption of fruits and vegetables, including apples, would provide consumers with more phenolics, which are proving to have important health benefits," Liu says. "I would encourage consumers to eat more and a wide variety of fruits and vegetables daily."

According to Liu, apples provide 33 percent of the phenolics that Americans consume annually. His study also found that apple phytochemicals inhibit an important inflammation pathway in human breast cancer cells.

One Breast Cancer Treatment, Just for You

By Mirielle Cailles

Thanks to a new development in genomic testing, breast cancer patients may now have a better understanding of their disease and how best to fight it. A multi-institutional team of scientists has designed a method that can help clinicians predict the survival rate of patients and how to most effectively treat their cancer.

Using equipment present in most hospital laboratories, researchers measured the activity level of more than 20,000 genes to better understand those genes that might be "turned on" or "turned off" in each tumor and how a disease might progress.

"Here we have developed a method that can be used in the everyday clinic and has the potential to benefit all breast cancer patients," says study co-author Charles Perou, Ph.D., associate professor of genetics and pathology in the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill. "Based on the genomics of a tumor, we can make good predictions about how a patient might do, but we can also define predictive markers that tell us which drugs to give patients."

Using DNA microarrays, Perou's team scanned thousands of genes within tumor samples of breast cancer patients. Classifying genes into one of five categories, researchers were able to identify specific genomic signatures corresponding to distinct disease outcomes. Research also showed that the test could predict how a tumor will respond to common chemotherapy regimens.

"We've demonstrated that this test can predict the likelihood a patient will relapse and can define the biologic subtype of their tumor - pieces of information that together could be used to make treatment decisions," Perou says. "The idea is for clinicians to use this knowledge to help determine what drugs a patient should get and should not get."