Ginger may be stronger than chemotherapy at fighting cancer

by Stepy — October 4, 2015

Ginger is revered for its many medicinal benefits. It came from Southeast Asia, from where it was traded around the world. It is often added to soups, sauces, and stir-fried vegetables to add a nice spicy kick. Ginger is also often used to make a tea.

“Ginger is one spice that I recommend keeping on hand in your kitchen at all times,” says Dr. Joseph Mercola, one of America’s leading physicians and health experts. “Not only is it a wonderful addition to your cooking (especially paired with garlic) but it also has enough medicinal properties to fill several books,” he adds.

New research shows that ginger may be stronger than chemotherapy at fighting cancer.

Most conventional treatments today focus on reducing tumor volume rather than attacking the disease at the source. Lately scientists have been focusing on getting to the sources of cancer, which are cancer stem cells.

The study showed that a compound 6-shogaol found in ginger targeted the root of breast cancer cells, namely breast cancer stem cells.

The study authors wrote the following:

“Cancer stem cells pose serious obstacle to cancer therapy as they can be responsible for poor prognosis and tumour relapse. To add into the misery, very few chemotherapeutic compounds show promise to kill these cells. Several researchers have shown that cancer stem cells are resistant to paclitaxel, doxorubicin, 5-fluorouracil, and platinum drugs [8, 16]. CSCs are thus an almost unreachable population in tumours for chemotherapy. Therefore any compound, that shows promise towards cancer stem cells, is a highly desirable step towards cancer treatment and should be followed up for further development.”

The researchers also identified the following ways in which ginger targets breast cancer:

• It reduces the expression of CD44/CD24 cancer stem cell surface markers in breast cancer spheroids (3-dimensional cultures of cells modeling stem cell like cancer)
• It significantly affects the cell cycle, resulting in increased cancer cell death
• It induces programmed cell death primarily through the induction of autophagy, with apoptosis a secondary inducer
• It inhibits breast cancer spheroid formation by altering Notch signaling pathway through γ-secretase inhibition.
• It exhibits cytotoxicity (cell killing properties) against monolayer (1-dimensional cancer model) and spheroid cells (3-dimensional cancer model).

The study showing that ginger may be stronger than chemotherapy at fighting cancer was published in the journal Plos One.

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REFERENCES:
1. “Ginger: 10,000x Stronger Than Chemo (Taxol) In Cancer Research Model.” GreenMedInfo.com. GreenMedInfo.com, n.d. Web. 02 Oct. 2015.
2. “6-Shogaol Inhibits Breast Cancer Cells and Stem Cell-Like Spheroids by Modulation of Notch Signaling Pathway and Induction of Autophagic Cell Death.” PLOS One. PLOS One, n.d. Web. 02 Oct. 2015.
3. “What Is Ginger Good For?” Mercola.com. Mercola.com, n.d. Web. 02 Oct. 2015.