In this Article we will elaborate on the newly found discoveries regarding vitamin k and its rapid emergence of being a anticancer profile. You will understand why some physicians and scientist now believe that vitamin k can be effective at fighting cancer at different stages. Vitamin K2 (menaquinone) has been shown to suppress the invasion and growth of human hepatocellular carcinoma. Carcinoma is a common and deadly variant of liver cancer. Vitamin K2 modifies the growth factors and their receptor molecules in a way that makes them less capable of being able to stimulate tumor growth and progression. It blocks further replication by freezing the cell cycle. And it triggers programmed cell death by apoptosis through several distinctive mechanisms.
Lab studies demonstrate tremendous potential for vitamin K in many other cancer types as well. Vitamin K2 induces specific kinds of human leukemia cells to differentiate or to turn into normal white blood cells. Cells from certain stomach cancer, brain tumors and in colorectal cancer lines, vitamin k stops the reproductive cell cycle and introduces apoptosis. As well as trigger a DNA degrading protein that cancer cells normally suppress. Effectively preventing tumor cells from repairing themselves as they should.
Lung cancer is very aggressive and is difficult to treat. vitamin K induces apoptosis through activation of a “suicide protein” within several stages of different kinds of lung cancer including small cell, squamous cell and adenocarcinomas. newer chemotherapy agents have been disappointing according to clinical trial research but when vitamin k was added to a certain newer drug imatinib mesylate, it rapidly suppressed growth in all lung cancer cell lines that were tested. Vitamin k shows very similar effects in bladder and liver cancers as well. Something that is relatively unique in vitamins k activity is so called “oncosis”, a form of stress-activated ischemic cell death where tumor cells are susceptible to. Since tumors grow so quick they consume gigantic amounts of glucose. And because they can rapidly outgrow their blood supplies, that high metabolism means they use up oxygen rapidly, this makes them especially susceptible to oxidant stress;much more than the healthy tissues that surround them. Vitamin K select tumor cells for degradation by stimulating oxidative stress, without toxicity to healthy tissues.
One other unique mechanism is which how cancer cells essentially “eat” themselves by releasing their own digestive enzymes internally. Vitamins C and K in combination contribute to cancer cell death by autoschizis, whereby cells simply split open, spilling their contents.
Finally, three of vitamin K’s synergistic anticancer mechanisms have recently been identified. Vitamin K3 inhibits DNA-building enzymes. Vitamins K2 and K3 block new blood vessel formation, which is essential in tumor growth for support. Vitamin K3 disrupts intercellular communications networks composed of microtubules, stopping the cells multiplying in their coordinated fashion.
Vitamin K’s promise in having a variety of advanced solid tumors has been established in vitro and in animal studies, where benefits have shown in lung cancers but not in gastrointestinal cancers, when combined with traditional chemotherapy.
Many other studies had demonstrated that major doses of vitamin K2 were safe and caused no enhancement of the chemotherapy, when given more than 2.5 grams of vitamin K2 given four times a day. Two case reports occurred in Japan. In one, a 72 year old woman with leukemia, who had failed standard therapy, experienced complete remission after vitamin k2 was added into her therapeutic regimen.
In the second, an 85 year-old man with hepatocellular carcinoma after hepatitis C infection chose to take vitamin K but no chemotherapy. The man’s tumor had been reduced majorly and his tumor markers in blood all normalized.
A study from Uruguay showed that serum markers in a group of prostate cancer patients indicated tumor cell reduction following supplementation with vitamins C and K.
Newly published studies have shown that vitamins K’s ability to reduce recurrence of liver cancer is extending as well as saving lives. The first reported on 61 patients documented to be free of their cancers following surgical treatment. Thirty-two were assigned to receive a vitamin K2 analogue called menatetrenone, while 29 received placebo. The group that had received the supplements had recurrence of tumors at 12 months, 39% at 24 months and 64.3% at 36 months. In the control group the recurrence rates were significantly higher: 55.2%, 83.2%, and 91.6%, going in the same order as listed above. 100% of the supplemented groups lived a whole year, with 87% of the testees still alive at 36 months of treatment and with the controls those numbers were 96.4 and a dreary 64%, respectively.
In a smaller test group with only 45 patients, the average rate of recurrence was 33.3% in patients who had been subjected to vitamin k compared to 50% in controls. Vitamin K2 has also shown that it induces MDS cells to differentiate into healthy white blood cells.
Studies of combination therapies have now provided substantial evidence favoring vitamin K2 both in liver and prostate cancer. US urologists studied the combination of vitamin k3, 50 mg a day, plus vitamin c at 5000 mg per day. hey showed that treatment significantly decreased the velocity of rise in PSA, the serum marker of disease, while it increased the time it took for the PSA levels to double. Only one patient in this group of advanced cancer, which consisted of 45 participants died in 14 months of treatment. This shows how capable of a cancer combatant vitamin k is.
Vitamin K2 in addition to a drug in the ACE-inhibitor category, both of which have the possibility of reducing vessel growth) also marked a drop in recurrence of hepatocellular carcinoma.
“Myelodysplastic syndrome” (MDS) is a disorder related to leukemia. Patients with MDS bone marrow begins to churn out increasingly young white blood cells in their cycle of various kinds. In most cases with MSD leads to leukemia. Unlike leukemia, MDS cells, early on, can be induced to develop into mature normal blood cells. And that’s where vitamin K helps.
Vitamin K treatment of bone marrow cells from MDS patients potently induces apoptosis, which we discussed earlier which is essentially programmed cell death,of the leukemia cells, with the effect of much more immense on blast cells than it could ever be on mature white cells. What Vitamin K2 can do is also induce MDS cells to differentiate into healthy white blood cells, even when full-blown leukemia has developed.
The successful combination of vitamin K2 with vitamin D3 achieved good differentiation in a lab study of leukemia cells, trying to prove that it might be an effective therapy for both MDS as well as fully developed leukemia. Midway 2010, a clinical study proved that the addition of vitamin D3 to vitamin K2 more than doubled the response rate of MDS patients with refractory anemia and low white blood counts, from 13% to 30%.
Thought long associated only with blood clotting, vitamin K is now known to have effects on tissues throughout the body, including many of the steps leading up to cancer. Vitamin K has been through enough clinical trials to prove that it is more than adequate enough to be used in some cases as a prevention method for cancer and has even cured some of further prevention of cancer.
