Green tea and COX-2 inhibitor slows prostate cancer

Green tea plus painkiller slows prostate cancer Reuters/Scientific American 3/14/07 "low doses of the COX-2 inhibitor celecoxib (sold as Celebrex), given along with a green tea polyphenol slowed the growth of prostate cancer in cell cultures and in a mouse model of the disease..."Celecoxib and green tea have a synergistic effect, each triggering cellular pathways, that, combined, are more powerful than either agent alone," Dr. Hasan Mukhtar ...Prior studies have linked the COX-2 enzyme to many cancer types, including prostate cancer. Mukhtar and colleagues previously found that COX-2 inhibitors like Celebrex suppress prostate cancer in animals. COX-2 inhibitors also have been shown to have adverse effects on the heart when taken at high doses for long periods of time...Mukhtar's team also previously found that the green tea polyphenol called EGCG has cancer-fighting abilities of its own; EGCG, they found, modulates key chemical pathways that fuel the death of human prostate cancer cells... in a mouse model of human prostate cancer, with the Celebrex plus green tea combination inhibiting the growth of prostate tumors by 81 percent, compared with 42 percent with green tea extract alone and 57 percent with Celebrex alone...It's worth noting that the dose of Celebrex used in the studies translates into about 200 milligrams per day, which is much lower than the typical colon cancer prevention trials where doses of up to 800 milligrams per day were used."

I hope someone does a study on curcumin, a natural COX-2 inhibitor with no noted side effects and EGCG. Studies have shown that curcumin directly blocks the enzymatic activity of COX-2 - plus curcumin seems to have other means of cancer prevention. So it would seem this might be a more preferably choice than Celebrex - but we'll need a study or two to prove it.

DogVitals antioxidant supplement for your dogs health