"Turmeric Curcumin and Pancreatic Cancer"
Pancreatic cancer is among the most aggressive forms of human cancer with a very high mortality rate.
It represents the fourth leading cause of cancer death in United States
with an annual mortality of 32,000 dead.
With a 5-year survival rate of only 3%
and an average survival of less than 6 months,
diagnosis of pancreatic cancer carries one of the poorest prognoses.
It's one of the worst things a doctor ever has to tell a patient.
The only FDA-approved therapies for it, Gemcitabine and Erlotinib,
produce objective responses in less than 10% of patients,
while causing severe side effects in the majority.
There is a desperate need for new options.
Clinical research to test new treatments are split up into phases.
Phase I trials are just to make sure the treatment is safe,
to see how much you can give someone before it becomes toxic.
Curcumin, the natural yellow pigment in the spice turmeric, has passed a number of those.
In fact, there’s so little toxicity, the dosing was limited only by
the number of pills that patients were willing to swallow.
Phase II is to see if it actually has any effect,
and it did, in two of the 21 advanced pancreatic cancer patients that were evaluated,
one of whom had a 73% tumor reduction.
This is what we like to see: before and after.
Unfortunately, the effect was short-lived.
This lesion remained small, but apparently a curcumin-resistant tumor clone emerged,
whereas the other patient showed slow improvement over a year, stable disease for over 18 months.
In fact, the only time their cancer markers bumped up
was during a brief 3-week stint where the curcumin was stopped.
So it does seem to help some patients with pancreatic cancer,
and most importantly, what's the downside?
No curcumin-related toxic effects up to doses of 8 grams a day.
What happens after 8?
We don't know because no one was willing to take that many pills.
They were willing to go on one of the nastiest chemotherapy regimens on the planet,
but didn't want to be inconvenienced with swallowing a lot of capsules.
Anyway, the only surefire way to beat pancreatic cancer is to prevent it in the first place.
In 2010, I profiled this study, the largest such study in history,
which found that dietary fat of animal origin was associated with increased pancreatic cancer risk,
but which animal fat is the worst?
Well, the second largest study has since chimed in to help answer that question.
Poultry was the worst. The first finding of its kind:
72% increased risk of pancreatic cancer for every 50 grams of daily poultry consumption.
That's just like a quarter of a chicken breast.
The reason white meat came out worse than red
may be because of the cooked meat carcinogens in chicken,
the heterocyclic amines that build up in grilled and baked chicken.
These mutagenic chemicals have been associated
with doubling of pancreatic cancer risk.
Other recent studies include one out of San Francisco, implicating the standard American diet,
and one out of Italy: high consumption of meat and other animal products, as well as of refined carbs,
was associated with pancreatic cancer risk,
whereas a diet rich in fruit and vegetables appeared to lower risk.
Eating meat may increase risk,
whereas eating fake meat has been found associated with significantly less risk.
Those who eat plant-based meats like veggie burgers and veggie dogs three times or more a week
had less than half the risk of fatal pancreatic cancer.
Legumes and dried fruit were found to be similarly protective.