Green tea and chemotherapy have long been viewed in various spheres
as potential weapons against cancer. While green tea's prospective
abilities in preventing and even combating cancer have gained a certain
traction among practitioners of natural and herbal healing, the
effectiveness of chemotherapy against cancer has long gained the
acceptance and approval of the scientific medical healing field.
But
can these two seemingly diverse agents possess points of convergence
that may make the war against malignant neoplasm even more potent and
effective? Or do they essentially operate in their own respective areas,
working their so-called magic independently of each other?
Green tea comes from the lightly fermented leaves of the tea plant camellia sinensis.
It is known to possess high levels of powerful antioxidants called
polyphenols. Antioxidants are materials that help fight free radicals -
compounds in the body that alter cells, damage DNA, and give rise to
abnormal growth of tumors that lead to cancer. EGCG or
epigallocatechin-gallate is the most important polyphenol in the brew
and is believed to help protect against cancer development by aiding the
self-destruction of these cells, and by affecting enzymes and the
communications between cells, thereby slowing the growth and
multiplication of cancerous cells.
On the other hand, chemotherapy
refers to a standardized regimen of cancer treatment involving either a
single neo-plastic drug or a combination or cocktail of such drugs.
Active agents in these drugs act by killing cells that divide and
replicate rapidly. However, this method also involves harming cells that
divide rapidly even under normal circumstances. This results in the
most common side effects of chemotherapy: the decreased production of
blood cells, the weakened state of the immune system, the inflammation
of the lining of the digestive tract, and the loss of hair.
Taken
hand-in-hand, do green tea and chemotherapy complement each other in the
crusade against their common enemy? Well, the findings have decidedly
been mixed.
A study conducted on mice by the School of
Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Shizuoka in Japan showed
that the effectiveness of the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin against
carcinoma tumors appeared to have more than doubled when green tea was
used as an adjunct. The tumors showed a higher concentration of the
doxorubicin in the tumor tissue when the mice ingested the tea.
Interestingly,
only the cancerous tissue reflected a higher concentration of the drug
as a result of the addition of the tea and not the normal ones. This may
suggest promising implications on the issue of side effects as it
implies that the drug's side effects may not increase when used in
tandem with the green tea.
Another study showed that the
chemotherapy drug adriamycin was likewise found to be more effective at
treating ovarian sarcoma when it was paired with green tea. The mice in
this study became very responsive to the treatment when they were given
the brew alongside the adriamycin while another group of mice not given
the tea proved unresponsive.
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