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| are useful as an anti-inflammatory in adjunctive nutritional support for primary treatment of hemorrhoids, swollen joints, athletic injuries, postsurgical edema, and postsurgical lymphedema in women with breast cancer who have had lymph node dissections. 97 |
| In vitro tests demonstrate OPCs are twenty times more powerful than ascorbic acid and fifty times more powerful than vitamin E as free-radical scavengers. OPCs have been defined as the natural stable form of the vitamin P substance found in numerous vegetables. PCOs (proanthocyanidin oligomers) are very similar to OPCs, but OPCs are the patented product with which most of the research and documented studies have been done.98 |
| Quercetin |
| Terrence Leighton, chairman of microbiology and immunology at the University of Berkeley, believes that quercetin, a flavone found in onions, broccoli, eucalyptus, and blue-green algae, is one of the most powerful anti-cancer agents present in nature. |
| By blocking proflammatory reactions in the body that release arachidonic acid into the cells, quercetin acts as a powerful inhibitor of the tumor-promoting PGE-2. It also stabilizes mast cell walls by prolonging the health of lipids, by blocking lipoxygenase activity, and by stabilizing capillary beds, decreasing capillary fragility. |
| Quercetin has been shown to inhibit the growth of several human cancer-cell lines, including breast (estrogen-receptor [ER] positive and ER-negative), ovarian, squamous cell, cervical, bladder, and gastric cancers, plus acute myeloid and acute lymphoid leukemia, Moloney murine leukemia (by inhibiting reverse transcriptase), and some lymphomas.99 100101 |
| Quercetin also inhibits multidrug resistance within the tumor-cell line. Multidrug resistance is associated with overexpression of a membrane protein called P-glycoprotein. Heat shock factor (HSF) is produced within the cell in response to heat or various forms of stress (for example, chemotherapy). HSF can cause P-glycoprotein to be overexpressed, which can then lead to chemotherapy resistance within the tumor cell. The result is that an effective cytotoxic drag is no longer doing its job. Quercetin can inhibit this process in a variety of neoplastic cell lines as well as in many chemotherapeutic agents that |
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