Health Bytes-q2-09

Coffee and strokes

A US study by Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health in Boston of 83,000 women indicated that those that drink five to seven cups of coffee a week were 12% less likely to have a stroke than were those who have just one cup a month, according to a report published in the journal Circulation.

"The benefit does not appear to come from caffeine. Those who drank tea and other caffeinated drinks did not experience the same reduction in stroke risk," commented Professor Martin Grond of the German Stroke Society.

The benefits of drinking coffee are thought to originate from antioxidants in the beverage which lower inflammation and improve blood vessel function.

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Tea and bortezomib

While green tea in and of itself may have beneficial anticancer properties, when taken with a widely used anticancer drug, Velcade, also called bortezomib, it may actually inhibit the drug’s effects on cancer patients.

Researchers from the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles found that some components in green tea may prevent bortezomib from killing cancerous tumor cells.

The researchers stressed that the negative effects of green tea only appeared in patients being treated with bortezomib and not other cancer-fighting agents, but they said that "patients currently undergoing bortezomib therapy should refrain from drinking green tea products, especially highly concentrated forms of teas." Bortezomib attacks cancer by inducing tumor cell death. But the researchers found that some polyphenols and other green tea components actually prevented bortezomib from doing its job.

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Tea and cancer

Mixing gold salts with common black tea creates a brew that shows "promising anticancer properties, according to a report entitled Green nanotechnology from tea: Phytochemicals in tea as building blocks for production of biocompatible gold nanoparticles published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry.

Researchers from the University of Missouri-Columbia, supported by the NCI Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer, discovered that the chemicals present in tea "are the best yet discovered to make consistent, biologically safe gold nanoparticles." The gold nanoparticles created in a simple cup of, in this case, Darjeeling tea, show promising anticancer properties.

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Green Tea and bortezomib

While green tea in and of itseld may have beneficial anticancer properties, when taken with a widely used anticancer drug Velcade, also called bortezomib, may actually inhibit the drug’s effects on cancer patients. Researchers from the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles found that some components in green tea may prevent bortezomib from killing cancerous tumor cells.

The researchers stressed that the negative effects of green tea only appeared in patients being treated with bortezomib and not other cancer-fighting agents, but they said that “patients currently undergoing bortezomib therapy should refrain from drinking green tea products, especially highly concentrated forms of teas.” Bortezomib attacks cancer by inducing tumor cell death. But the researchers found that some polyphenols and other green tea components actually prevented bortezomib from doing its job.

Read more

Tea and cancer

Mixing gold salts with common black tea creates a brew that shows “promising anticancer properties, according to a report entitled Green nanotechnology from tea: Phytochemicals in tea as building blocks for production of biocompatible gold nanoparticles published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry.

Researchers from the University of Missouri-Columbia, supported by the NCI Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer, discovered that the chemicals present in tea “are the best yet discovered to make consistent, biologically safe gold nanoparticles.” The gold nanoparticles created in a simple cup of, in this case, Darjeeling tea, show promising anticancer properties. The research team, headed by Kattesh V. Katti, Ph.D., M.Sc.Ed., principal investigator of the National Cancer Institute-funded Hybrid Nanoparticles in Imaging and Therapy of Prostate Cancer Platform Partnership, added gold salts to a pot of Darjeeling tea. The salts are reduced by the tea’s phytochemicals, ingredients that also have proven health benefits. Fortuitously, the tea chemicals that regulate the size of these nanoparticles also increase their likelihood of being taken into breast and prostate cancer cells, improving their potential as targeted anticancer drugs. The nanoparticles are also highly stable in biological fluids.

“The discovery of tea’s nontoxic formation of nanoparticles is of paramount importance for medical and technological applications,” Dr. Katti said. “Gold nanoparticles have many potential medicinal and technological uses, such as targeted anticancer drugs, but currently their synthesis needs toxic reagents that make them unsuitable for use in the body. The natural chemicals used in this new method are harmless in the body, and the reaction produces no toxic byproducts, only some slightly unusual tasting cold tea.”