Showing posts with label Brain Tumor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brain Tumor. Show all posts
Monday, 9 March 2020
Thursday, 17 October 2019
Double-drug strategy blocks escape route for most lung cancers
A one-two combo punch using two currently available drugs could be an effective treatment for the majority of lung cancers, a study by scientists with UT Southwestern's Simmons Cancer Center shows.
- April 3, 2018
- UT Southwestern Medical Center
- A one-two combo punch using two currently available drugs could be an effective treatment for the majority of lung cancers, a study shows.
FULL STORY
A one-two combo punch using two currently available drugs could be an effective treatment for the majority of lung cancers, a study by scientists with UT Southwestern's Simmons Cancer Center shows.
Researchers found that a combination of drugs -- one targeting epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and one targeting tumor necrosis factor (TNF) -- effectively blocks the cancer from using TNF as an escape route. Using a mouse model, the researchers showed that when TNF is also blocked, the cancer becomes sensitive to EGFR treatment.
"There has been a tremendous effort over the past several years to block EGFR as a treatment for lung cancer, but this therapy only works in a small subset of patients. The cancer fights back with a bypass pathway," said senior author Dr. Amyn Habib with the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center at UT Southwestern and a staff physician at the Dallas Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
"Blocking both of these proteins could be a treatment that is beneficial for the majority of lung cancer patients," said Dr. Habib, Associate Professor of Neurology and Neurotherapeutics with UT Southwestern's Peter O'Donnell Jr. Brain Institute.
Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer deaths in the U.S. for both men and women, according to the National Cancer Institute and in 2017, lung cancer caused 26 percent of all cancer deaths. Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the type of lung cancer for which the EGFR/TNF inhibitor combination would be effective, comprises approximately 85 percent of all lung cancers.
The latest findings build on previous work by Dr. Habib's lab showing that the same combination of drugs was successful in a mouse model of glioblastoma, a deadly type of brain cancer.
Researchers are now planning a phase 2 clinical trial of the two-drug strategy, and because the two drugs are already FDA-approved, they hope to be able to launch the trial within a year, said oncologist Dr. David Gerber with the Simmons Cancer Center, who will lead the trial.
The clinical trial being planned will test the treatment in both lung cancer patients and those with glioblastomas.
"If this strategy is effective, then it might be broadly applicable not only against lung cancer but also against other cancers that express EGFR, which include brain, colon, and head and neck cancers," said Dr. Gerber, Associate Professor of Internal Medicine and Clinical Sciences.
Another advantage of the anti-EGFR/TNF strategy is that the drugs are well-tolerated. Both the EGFR inhibitors and TNF inhibitors fall into the category of targeted drugs, meaning they affect specific molecules within cancer cells, and therefore have fewer side effects. Traditional chemotherapy drugs, on the other hand, have broad effects, killing cells in both cancer and healthy tissue, and leading to many unpleasant side effects.
Until now, EGFR inhibitors have only been effective at treating the 10 to 15 percent of non-small cell lung cancers that have a variant of EGFR, but the two-drug combo could potentially work for all non-small cell lung cancers, explained Dr. John Minna, Director of the Hamon Center for Therapeutic Oncology Research and Professor of Internal Medicine and Pharmacology.
"This finding has the possibility of dramatically altering how we treat lung cancer," said Dr. John Minna, who holds the Sarah M. and Charles E. Seay Distinguished Chair in Cancer Research and the Max L. Thomas Distinguished Chair in Molecular Pulmonary Oncology at UT Southwestern, which is recognizing its 75th-year anniversary in 2018.
The research appears in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Other UT Southwestern faculty members who contributed to this research are: Dr. Boning Gao, Assistant Professor with the Hamon Center for Therapeutic Oncology Research and Pharmacology; Dr. Kimmo Hatanpaa, Associate Professor of Pathology; Dr. Kemp Kernstine, Professor of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery and holder of the Robert Tucker Hayes Foundation Distinguished Chair in Cardiothoracic Surgery; Dr. Yang Xie, Associate Professor of Clinical Sciences and Bioinformatics; Dr. Hong Zhu, Assistant Professor of Clinical Sciences and with the Simmons Cancer Center; Dr. Farjana Fattah, Assistant Professor with the Simmons Cancer Center and Pathology; Dr. Masaya Takahashi, Associate Professor with the Advanced Imaging Research and Radiology; Dr. Bipasha Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology; Dr. Sandeep Burma, Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology; and Dr. Jonathan Dowell, Professor of Internal Medicine;
Story Source:
Materials provided by UT Southwestern Medical Center. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
- Ke Gong, Gao Guo, David E. Gerber, Boning Gao, Michael Peyton, Chun Huang, John D. Minna, Kimmo J. Hatanpaa, Kemp Kernstine, Ling Cai, Yang Xie, Hong Zhu, Farjana Fattah, Shanrong Zhang, Masaya Takahashi, Bipasha Mukherjee, Sandeep Burma, Jonathan Dowell, Kathryn Dao, Vassiliki A. Papadimitrakopoulou, Victor Olivas, Trever G. Bivona, Dawen Zhao, Amyn A. Habib. TNF-driven adaptive response mediates resistance to EGFR inhibition in lung cancer. Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2018; DOI: 10.1172/JCI96148
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180403140408.htm
Friday, 4 October 2019
MUST READ - Could £400-per-year drug cocktail be the key to beating one of the most-deadly cancers? Henry was given 14 months to live now his cancer is stable thanks to his four everyday medicines
We tend to associate breakthrough treatments with new — and often unaffordable — drugs.
But it seems a remarkable improvement in the survival time of patients with brain cancer has been achieved using a combination of four old drugs (a statin, a diabetes pill, an antibiotic tablet and a dewormer) that cost just £400 a year.
Results from an ongoing trial run by the private Care Oncology Clinic in London suggest that giving this new combination treatment doubled the average survival time.
Survival rates for brain tumours have remained unchanged for at least 20 years, when the brain cancer drug temozolomide came on to the market. Around 15 per cent of adult patients survive for more than five years after diagnosis. For glioblastoma, the most aggressive type of brain cancer, the figure is between 6 and 10 per cent.
The new study involved nearly 100 patients with glioblastoma — the fast-growing type of brain cancer affecting politician Tessa Jowell — treated at the clinic over three years with the combination treatment, as well as radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
The average survival time for glioblastoma is estimated to be between eight and 14 months — the average survival time for the patients given the new combination treatment was 27.1 months.
Earlier this year Tessa Jowell spoke movingly in the House of Lords to highlight the lack of funding for research into brain cancer — she suggested that the survival rates reflected the fact that less than 2 per cent of UK cancer research funding goes to this area.
Developing a new cancer drug can take ten years, and the cost for treating one patient can be deemed prohibitive — one of the latest cancer drugs, pembrolizumab, used for advanced melanoma and lung cancer, costs nearly £100,000 a year. The drug cocktail used at the Care Oncology Clinic is available now and costs only a few hundred pounds.
One of those who’s been treated with it is Henry Searle who was diagnosed with glioblastoma just over three years ago at the age of 19.
It was discovered too late for surgery, and even with chemotherapy and radiation therapy, he was expected to live for only 14 months.
Alarmed by these odds, Henry’s parents — Vicki, who works in the tourism industry and Jonathan, a chiropodist — were determined to give him every chance, and despite objections from his oncologist, they got him started on the drug cocktail which had just become available at the clinic.
Defiant: His oncology team told him that even with the 'gold standard' treatment (chemotherapy and radiotherapy) he was only expected to live for 14 months
Two years after Henry’s diagnosis, his NHS consultant wrote to the family to say that while they needed to keep an eye on him, there was ‘no evidence of active disease’ and that Henry didn’t need further cancer treatment via the NHS. (His family continue to seek alternative treatment for him outside the NHS to stop the cancer returning).
Henry is still on the drug cocktail (the last time he had chemotherapy was in 2015) and today his scans show the tumour is no longer growing. And the cost of this life-changing treatment? Between £200 and £400 a year plus £1,000 for four consultations.
It involves four old — therefore cheap — drugs long used for other conditions and so considered safe. Two are among the best-selling medications in the world: atorvastatin, a type of statin, and the diabetes drug metformin.
The other two are an antibiotic, doxycycline, used for dental infections and acne, and mebendazole, a deworming pill. So how could this apparently random combination of drugs reduce tumours?
What links them is that in various ways they interfere with a tumour’s ability to absorb or use the resources they need to grow. The way the body controls energy is known as metabolism. The metabolism of cancer cells is different from the one that powers healthy cells.
Cancer cells need much greater amounts of glucose, the form of sugar our bodies use for energy. So making it less available, which metformin in particular does, means that the drug combination is effectively starving the cancer cells.
Weakened by the energy drop they become more vulnerable to attack by the chemotherapy and radiotherapy routinely used to treat cancer.
Miracle: Two years after Henry’s diagnosis, his NHS consultant wrote to the family to say there was ‘no evidence of active disease’ and that Henry didn’t need further cancer treatment
The idea behind this approach to cancer is known as the metabolic theory — meaning it deals with the use of energy in the body. Because the drug cocktail targets the way cancer cells get their growth factors and raw material for making energy, it has the potential to be effective for a variety of cancer types.
The drug cocktail was put together by the Care Oncology Clinic’s co-founder Dr Robin Bannister, a research scientist, from a list compiled by the clinic’s researchers trawling through thousands of studies on licenced drugs that were also shown to have anti-cancer properties.
The normal route for testing a new treatment is what’s called a randomised controlled trial, where it is compared against an alternative, often a placebo. As the patents on the drugs in the new cocktail have run out, there is no incentive for the drug companies to do these (expensive) trials.
Instead, the results were based on what’s known as a ‘service evaluation’, where data is gathered from patients in a real-world setting as approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency — the UK drug watchdog.
The clinic plans to use this data to supply NICE with the evidence it needs to make the treatment available on the NHS. ‘Giving these safe drugs to patients in a real-world trial allows us to gather valuable information on how they impact on cancer,’ says Robin Bannister.
One of the clinic’s physicians, Dr Padman Vamadevan, who has previously worked in the NHS, says the results are ‘slowly changing the attitudes among consultants whose patients attend the clinic’.
‘When we started, not many oncologists were familiar with treating the metabolic features of cancer, so they were sceptical,’ he says. ‘But now patients report that their doctors are genuinely interested in this research as they see the apparent benefits.’
Combination: Because the drug cocktail targets the way cancer cells get their growth factors and raw material for energy, it has the potential to be effective for a variety of cancer types
Dr Lucinda Melcher, a clinical oncologist at the North Middlesex University Hospital in Edmon- ton, admits that she was not initially convinced.
Her husband Adam Blain, a 48-year-old lawyer, has glioblastoma and having had all the NHS had to offer, he began treatment at the clinic over three years ago.
‘I was sceptical at first because their drug regimen was then not backed up by any evidence but the team there was obviously professional and committed and the treatment is scientifically plausible,’ says Dr Melcher.
Adam, a father of three, who is still on the drug cocktail, has had to stop working but has a good quality of life, although his short-term memory is poor, says his wife.
But while Dr Melcher is delighted her husband has beaten the odds, she is not convinced that it was due to the drug combination.
‘It could still be chance,’ she says. ‘It’s possible that Adam is one of the 10 per cent of these patients who survive five years on the standard treatment, especially since his tumour was completely removed which improves your chances.’
Robin Bannister points out that: ‘Every oncologist has their own list of “miracles”; people who have lived far longer and better than was expected.
‘And that is why we need to conduct studies with enough patients to make sure the chance element can be accounted for.
‘The hundred people treated in this trial makes it one of the larger studies ever done with glioblastoma.’ (This compares with one of the trials for temozolomide, which involved over 500 patients.)
The study is continuing. The next step is to compare the results of the nearly 100 glioblastoma patients treated at the clinic with a closely matched group of NHS patients who only received the standard treatment of radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
The results will make the findings of the trial more reliable and are expected to be published in a journal later this year.
For more information, visit: careoncologyclinic.com
EXPERTS WHO THINK A HIGH-FAT DIET CAN FIGHT BRAIN TUMOURS
Raffi Kalamian Walsh was just four when a routine eye check picked up a worrying change and he was diagnosed with brain cancer.
Over the next 14 months, Raffi was given weekly chemotherapy followed by 12 weeks of a different chemo drug followed by two operations to remove part of the tumour. Two months later a scan showed it was back and spreading.
‘I can’t begin to describe how devastating it was to watch our young child being taken apart, piece by precious piece,’ says Raffi’s mother Miriam, who, with her husband, Peter, had adopted Raffi when he was two.
Tragic: Raffi Kalamian Walsh was just four when a routine eye check picked up a worrying change and he was diagnosed with brain cancer
Three years after his diagnosis Raffi began treatment with a combination of five cancer drugs. ‘Within weeks my normally cheerful little guy was nauseous, fatigued, and unable to focus,’ recalls Miriam.
‘When he opened his mouth to speak, all that came out was gibberish.’ While searching for information about Raffi’s drugs, Miriam stumbled on a radically different approach to cancer, based on the idea that a very high fat, low carbohydrate diet could slow tumour growth. It was being investigated by Professor Thomas Seyfried, a biochemistry researcher at Boston University.
Miriam explains: ‘Professor Seyfried had shown it was possible to slow the growth of brain tumours in mice.
‘I knew it was not yet tested in people, but Raffi desperately needed something different.’ Surprisingly her son’s doctors agreed.
The five cancer drugs were stopped and within three months Raffi’s tumour had shrunk by almost 15 per cent. He returned to being a talkative, energetic little boy.
The ketogenic diet involves avoiding foods containing sugar: sweets, biscuits, puddings, along with grains, pasta and bread, even wholegrain types, plus starchy vegetables such as potatoes or cooked carrots, as well as all legumes, beans and pulses.
Instead the diet is built around fats including butter, cream, coconut oil, olive and avocado oils and some omega 3 oils, small portions of protein such as meat, fish or eggs, as well as salad and non-starchy vegetables (such as broccoli and green beans).
Strength: Over the next 14 months, Raffi was given weekly chemotherapy followed by 12 weeks of a different chemo drug followed by operations to remove part of the tumour
Fruit is limited to berries, as these are low in sugar. The aim is to starve cancer cells of glucose, their preferred fuel. Lacking carbohydrates the body burns fat instead and your liver starts pumping out substances called ketones which can replace glucose as fuel for the brain and muscles.
Crucially, however, tumours can’t use ketones as fuel.
Miriam concedes Raffi struggled with social events: ‘because there were cakes and sweets everywhere,’ she says. ‘But that was a walk in the park compared to what he had endured in terms of gruelling treatments.’ During his first nine months on the diet Raffi also received a low dose of chemotherapy drug, before relying just on the diet.
The odds against Raffi were daunting — at his diagnosis doctors said he had a one in three chance of any response to treatment.
‘The first three years on the diet were phenomenal,’ says Miriam. ‘He seemed almost completely well again.’
Miriam was so impressed by the immediate and beneficial effect of the diet that she signed up for a master’s degree in nutrition. Her book – Keto for Cancer – just published in the UK – tells the story of Raffi’s remarkable success as well as being a handbook for anyone wanting to follow the diet.
Raffi remained on the diet for six years. ‘Much of the time he was living pretty normally,’ Miriam says. ‘In contrast, children with brain tumours following the standard protocol often undergo treatment after treatment until the end.’ Dr Nelofer Syed, a senior research fellow and lecturer in cancer biology at Imperial College London, agrees the ketogenic diet has great potential.
‘Early research shows that it can improve the effectiveness of both chemotherapy and radiotherapy and that cancers find it difficult to use ketones for energy,’ she says.
Loss: He died nine years after he was diagnosed, at the age of 13 in April 2013
She is the co-author of an article summarising research on the diet, published last year in the journal Frontiers In Molecular Neuroscience.
It reported on lab studies showing the diet could, among other things, reduce the ability of tumours to hook up to a blood supply and make it harder for cancer to spread. However as yet, there have been no big studies testing the diet against other therapies, and Cancer Research UK does not recommend it as an alternative to the standard healthy balanced diet.
‘We’d all love better evidence,’ says Dr Syed, ‘but providing patients do it under the supervision of a dietitian who is trained in delivering it, I think it is worth trying.’
The ketogenic diet is already approved by NICE for children with epilepsy; a big randomised trial for childhood epilepsy showed it could reduce or even stop the seizures.
Ultimately, however, the diet couldn’t save Raffi. He died nine years after he was diagnosed, at the age of 13 in April 2013.
Not every patient will benefit as dramatically as Raffi did and his success doesn’t ‘prove’ the diet works. ‘Its value is as an add-on to what you’re already doing with your oncology team,’ says Miriam. She adds: ‘The diet kicked the can down the road for six years.
‘During a period when most people with cancer are in clinics or hospitals, Raffi was out riding his trike.’
Keto For Cancer by Miriam Kalamian (Chelsea Green, (£18.99).
Wednesday, 25 September 2019
Berberine - A Plant Remedy for Diabetes, Cancer, Blood Pressure and More
It has the potential to treat so many modern health concerns like obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and even Alzheimer’s disease
It’s been a feature of Chinese, Indian and South Asian medicine for over a thousand years. In modern times it’s backed by robust research, successful high quality trials and proven benefits. Yet berberine is not well known, even among devotees of alternative medicine..
Since it has the potential to treat so many modern health concerns like obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and even Alzheimer’s disease, it’s a mystery that it doesn’t get better press.
Now evidence has emerged that this ancient remedy can fight cancer, too…
Protects many body organs
Berberine isn’t a specific herb or plant, it’s a compound. It can be detected in more than 400 species of plants. Chemically, it’s an alkaloid, which means it consists mainly of nitrogen atoms that perform multiple physiological actions in humans.
Rich sources of berberine include barberry, goldenseal, goldthread, Oregon grape and tree turmeric. It’s also one of the principal alkaloids found in the Chinese herb Huang lian (CoptidisRhizoma).
In traditional medicine these species have been used to treat a vast range of problems. These include infections from all types of pathogen, hemorrhoids, diarrhea, indigestion, intestinal parasites, uterine and vaginal disorders, and – as I mentioned earlier – obesity and diabetes. It’s even used as an antidote to snake bites and scorpion stings.
Modern research shows berberine to be an antioxidant comparable in its effects to vitamin C, and a powerful anti-inflammatory, too.
Cardiovascular benefits: Berberine improves blood supply to the tissues and benefits patients with heart failure. It improves the heart’s ability to contract and reduces irregular beats.
Lab studies demonstrate it expands blood vessels by boosting nitric oxide production, and lowers elevated blood pressure. Berberine also reduces constriction of the vessels by lowering expression of COX-2, an enzyme that causes inflammation, as well as another pro-inflammatory, TNF alpha. Berberine boosts various enzymes which protect the heart and help prevent plaque formation in the arteries.
A human trial using barberry juice found it “was associated with a significant reduction in systolic and diastolic blood pressure in comparison to the control group.”
Cholesterol: Berberine lowers cholesterol by a different mechanism than statins. All by itself, this plant extract reduced “bad” LDL cholesterol in 67 patients by 23.8% compared to only 14.3% of the group that took statins. But combining the two reduced cholesterol by 31.8%.
In another human study researchers described berberine as a “potent lipid lowering compound.”
Blood sugar: Many studies have demonstrated the blood-sugar-lowering properties of berberine. It does so through seven separate mechanisms.
In a study of 84 type 2 diabetes patients, berberine was just as effective as metformin – the widely prescribed diabetes drug — but unlike the drug it also lowered total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol. Berberine was found to be “a potent oral hypoglycemic agent…”
Obesity: A potential role was established in 2014 when researchers performed a study on obese mice. They found berberine ” increases energy expenditure, limits weight gain, improves cold tolerance and enhances brown adipose tissue.”
In a human study, obese patients lost five pounds over 12 weeks. They also saw a significant reduction in blood fats. Triglycerides dropped 23% and there was 12.2% decrease in cholesterol levels.
Metabolic Syndrome: Several trials have been conducted on patients suffering at least three of the following conditions: poor blood sugar control, high blood pressure, obesity, high triglycerides and low HDL “good” cholesterol.
In one of these — a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial in 24 patients — the scientists concluded that “berberine leads to remission of metabolic syndrome and decreases in waist circumference, systolic blood pressure, triglycerides, and total insulin secretion, with an increase in insulin sensitivity.”
Liver, kidneys and lungs: Berberine protected the liver of mice given a chemotherapy drug that’s toxic to this organ. The herbal extract achieved this by inhibiting the damage caused by free radicals and by reducing inflammation.
In a trial involving 80 patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, only the half taking berberine for three months saw a significant decrease in elevated liver enzymes, triglycerides and cholesterol.
In a study of patients with hypertension and diabetes – factors that in time cause chronic kidney damage – the addition of berberine to their treatment protocol significantly reduced biochemical markers of kidney damage, improved blood flow to the organ, reduced inflammation and lowered oxidative stress.
Berberine’s potential to protect the lungs of mice was demonstrated when acute lung injury was induced by exposure to cigarette smoke. Pre-treatment with the alkaloid reduced both lung inflammation and injury.
Alzheimer’s: In 2009 researchers from South Korea and Japan conducted various lab studies. Their results indicated that “Coptidisrhizoma alkaloids have a strong potential of inhibition and prevention of Alzheimer’s disease.”
Another group from Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia wrote in 2015, “The promising results seen provide a convincing and substantial basis to support further scientific exploration and development of the therapeutic potential of BBR [berberine] against neurodegenerative diseases.”
Anti-cancer effects
Described as a master regulator of metabolism, AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) is an important enzyme that maintains a constant environment within cells and organs.
To achieve this, AMPK has to juggle a large range of factors to normalize fat, sugar and energy imbalances.
AMPK is a target in the treatment of diabetes and metabolic syndrome because these illnesses turn off AMPK-regulated pathways. A key reason for the success of berberine in improving these conditions is that it’s one of only a few natural compounds that can activate AMPK.
But AMPK has also attracted attention as a suppressor of tumors.
Disruption of energy production at the cellular level is a core feature of cancer and there is a marked decline of AMPK in cancer cells. Lab studies confirm that activating AMPK leads to better energy regulation and this inhibits cell growth.
Scientists writing in Oncotarget in 2015 stated: “There is a vast literature demonstrating the tumor suppressor function of AMPK in lung, colorectal, and liver cancer with a growing literature in other cancers, such as, prostate and melanoma.”
Berberine not only increases the activity of this enzyme, it also boasts many other anti-cancer properties as demonstrated in lab research. These were summarized in a 2009 review.
They include the inhibition of:
- cancer-causing micro-organisms
- enzymes produced by carcinogenic chemicals
- the pro-inflammatory, cancer-stimulating enzyme COX-2
- Topoisomerase, an enzyme capable of breaking a strand of DNA
- Telomerase, an enzyme produced by cancer cells to allow never-ending growth
- MMPs – enzymes that dissolve tissue so cancer can spread
- NF-kB, a protein complex that promotes inflammation and prevents cancer cells from dying
- tumor cell proliferation
I would probably weary you if I went into detail on some of the more complex actions of berberine. It can form a protective complex with DNA and RNA, is capable of inducing apoptosis (natural cell death) in many types of cancer cell, acts beneficially against the cancer cell’s signaling and metabolic functions, and also has anti-cancer potential through its antioxidant properties.
In a lab study carried out in 1990, berberine was tested on six malignant brain tumor cell lines. It killed a staggering 91 percent of them, compared to a cell kill rate of only 43 percent for the chemotherapy drug carmustine. When the two treatments were combined, the cell kill rate lifted to 97 percent.
Please note that studies like this on lab-grown cells are not the last word. Studies in animals and humans are needed to confirm. And we were able to find at least one. . .
In rodents with brain tumors, berberine had an 80.9 percent cell kill. Unsurprisingly, the neurosurgeons conducting the study concluded that berberine had potent anti-tumor activity.
In December, 2018 scientists wrote in Anticancer agents in medicinal chemistry: “Berberine has multitudinous anti-cancer stem cell effects making it a highly promising candidate substance for the next-generation cancer therapy.”
Yet in spite of 500 research papers on berberine and cancer alone, some of which show it enhances the effect of chemotherapy and makes tumors more sensitive to radiation, there have been no published human trials.
However, a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial is currently in progress to see if 300 mg of berberine hydrochloride a day can reduce the occurrence of new colorectal adenomas among patients with a history of colorectal cancer. It will report in 2021.
Berberine supplements
While berberine is generally well tolerated and safe at doses ranging from 500 to 1500 mg per day, it can cause mild to moderate gastrointestinal upset in the form of nausea, constipation, diarrhea or abdominal pain.
If it does cause side effects, taking it in three or more divided doses may relieve the problem.
Berberine can also lower blood pressure, so people with low blood pressure need to use it with caution. Similarly, it can lower blood sugar so a person taking it for that condition needs to monitor his or her blood sugar.
Another concern is that it can inhibit some liver enzymes. For this reason, experts recommend it should only be used for two months out of every three or under the supervision of a doctor who is monitoring liver function.
My impression is that this is not a “once-a-day, forever” supplement, but one that can be extremely useful for short or medium-term use to treat a specific condition.
References:
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6111450
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4480686
- http://www.medicinacomplementar.com.br/biblioteca/pdfs/Cancer/ca-2013.pdf
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2122945
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30526471
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