NOW Foods - Preliminary Mouse Study Shows Promise for Vitamin C and N-Acetyl-Cysteine in Cell Health

Preliminary Mouse Study Shows Promise for Vitamin C and N-Acetyl-Cysteine in Cell Health

By Greg Arnold, DC, CSCS, September 23, 2007, abstracted from “HIF-Dependent…Effect of Antioxidants In Vivo” in the September 2007 issue of Cancer Cell

Cancer continues to be one of the top two killers of Americans (along with heart disease) and is estimated to kill an estimated 559,650 Americans in 2007.¹ Cancer occurs a number of different ways, from the activation of cancer proteins called oncogenes to the loss of tumor suppressor proteins like the p53 protein² and the accumulation of DNA damage through oxidation.

Antioxidants have consistently been advocated as a way to help maintain cell health in regards to cancer. Vitamin C has been studied for nearly 30 years³ while N-acetyl-cysteine (NAC) has gained attention recently. Researchers found that 1800 mg of NAC per day significantly decreased DNA oxidative damage⁴ although “no measurable impact” for cancer was seen in a study supplementing 600 mg of NAC per day for two years.⁵

Now a new study on mice⁶ has found that vitamin C and NAC may indeed play critical roles in overall cell health in regards to cancer. They do this by playing an influential role in the activity of a protein called HIF-1, which “significantly contributes” to the activation of a protein called VEGF that stimulates blood vessel formation during cancer.⁷

Because earlier research has found that increasing levels of oxidative stress activate HIF-1,^{(8, 9)} the researchers reasoned the free-radical scavengers like vitamin C and NAC would be effective in “silencing” HIF-1 activity. They found that NAC (administered at doses of 10 millimoles) had a profound effect on lowering VEGF levels by as much as 67% by controlling HIF-1 activity and decreasing a variation of HIF-1 called HIF-1-alpha. Coincidentally, NAC accomplished this through identical mechanisms as those observed in studies using vitamin C previously.¹⁰

For the researchers, “These findings challenge the paradigm that antioxidants diminish [the onset of cancer] primarily through decreasing DNA damage and mutations and provide significant support for a key [anti-cancer] effect of diminishing HIF levels.”

Greg Arnold is a Chiropractic Physician practicing in Danville, CA. You can contact Dr. Arnold directly by emailing him at mailto:PitchingDoc@msn.com or visiting his web site at www.CompleteChiropracticHealthcare.com

Reference:

¹ American Cancer Society

² A. Sablina, A.V. Budanov, G.V. Ilyinskaya, L.S. Agapova, J.E. Kravchenko and P.M. Chumakov, 11 (2005), pp. 1306–1313

³ E. Cameron, L. Pauling and B. Leibovitz, Cancer Res. 39 (1979), pp. 663–681

⁴ G. Mantovani. J. Mol. Med. 81 (2003), pp. 664–673

⁵ M.L. Aitio, Br. J. Clin. Pharmacol. 61 (2006), pp. 5–15

⁶ Zhang GP. Cancer Cell 2007 Sep;12(3):230-8.

⁷ G.L. Semenza, Nat. Rev. Cancer 3 (2003), pp. 721–732

⁸ H. Zhang, P. Gao, R. Fukuda, G. Kumar, B. Krishnamachary, K.I. Zeller, C.V. Dang and G.L. Semenza, Cancer Cell 11 (2007), pp. 407–420

⁹ J. Pouyssegur, F. Dayan and N.M. Mazure, Nature 441 (2006), pp. 437–443

¹⁰ H. Lu, C.L. Dalgard, A. Mohyeldin, T. McFate, A.S. Tait and A. Verma, J. Biol. Chem. 280 (2005), pp. 41928–41939