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Red chilli peppers contain cancer-busting chemicals: study

ISLAMABAD: Researchers are rolling out the spice rack against cancer with studies showing that ginger and the hot element in red chili peppers could kill tumour cells.

The ginger and chilli-pepper studies were presented during the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Washington. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh experimented on mice to show that capsaicin, the active ‘hot’ ingredient in the pepper, killed pancreatic cancer cells through the body’s normal process for clearing defective cells.

“We discovered that capsaicin fed orally to mice with human pancreatic tumours was an extremely effective inhibitor of the cancer process, inducing apoptosis (natural cell death) in cancer cells,” said an assistant professor of pharmacology at Pitt and lead author of the study Sanjay Srivastava.

Tumours treated with capsaicin were half the size of tumours found in mice that were treated with saline solution by the end of the study. Scientists at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Centre tested powdered ginger against ovarian-cancer-cell cultures in a lab and planned to work with mouse in the next phase.

The research found that ginger caused cell death in all the ovarian-cancer cell lines tested. Moreover, the spice caused cancer cells to be destroyed both through the normal cell-death process and through another mechanism that involves the cells digesting themselves.

The second mechanism is important, because it might offer a way around the difficult tendency of ovarian cancer cells to become resistant to conventional chemotherapy, said an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the UM Medical School and author of the study Dr Rebecca Liu.

Ginger is known to be effective at controlling inflammation, which contributes to the development of ovarian cancer cells. By halting the inflammatory reaction, the researchers suggest, ginger also stops cancer cells from growing.

“We found that ginger induced cell death at a similar or better rate than platinum-based chemotherapy drugs used to treat ovarian cancer,” said an oncology fellow and co-author of the study Dr Jennifer Rhode.

Another review of studies evaluating the use of soy supplements against breast cancer finds that there is only a slight benefit. A study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute says that while soy intake may be associated with a small reduction in the risk of breast cancer, the evidence is too weak to recommend widespread use of the supplements.

The soy connection has been widely debated and tested for nearly three decades since scientists first noted that Asian women have much lower breast-cancer rates than women in Western nations. The scientists have also observed an increase in breast-cancer rates among the Asian women who moved to the United States.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University pooled the results of 18 studies published between 1978 and 2004 that looked at the association between soy intake and breast-cancer risk.

The researchers found an overall relative reduction in breast-cancer risk for soy-eaters — a modest 14 percent for Caucasian women — but the effect was not statistically significant for Asian women.

“We found that soy-food intake was associated with a reduced breast-cancer risk, but the data is not adequate to provide a clear answer to recommend soy foods to prevent breast cancer,” said a professor of oncology at Georgetown’s Lombardi Cancer Centre Leena Hilakivi-Clarke.

The researchers warned women against taking high-dose soy supplements. APP

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