antioxidants and chemo paper

[Rich66]

LINK (http://www.resorttohealth.com.au/uploaded/files/client_added/Mini%20Review%20-%20Impact%20of%20antioxidants.pdf)

A 2008 paper looks at available information on antioxidants used during chemo treatment.

[TanyaRD]

Thanks for posting this paper. I enjoy this topic and look forward to better studies in the future and a true sense of whether or not antioxidants are safe during treatment. I have to play Devil's Advocate for a minute as one thought kept coming to mind as I re-read the review. Many of these studies demonstrated decreased toxicity from chemotherapy and patients being able to tolerate more full doses of chemotherapy (putting study design aside). Is it possible that patients tolerated treatment better and had less toxicity because the drug efficacy was decreased by the presence of antioxidants (i.e. less drug getting into the cells because of antioxidant ability to protect cell walls)? Again, this is just an unanswered question that I hope will be answered in upcoming research. I hope that it is not the case because I think all of us would welcome anything that reduces toxicity from chemotherapy and cancer treatment in general.

[Rich66]

Some of the combinations do have response data comparisons between with and without.
For instance, Glutathione seems to increase response rate.

Kind of hard to read sideways on the computer;)
Here toward the end is some horizontal text:

Tumor response rates were not the focus of this review, however it is noteworthy that all but one 47 of the antioxidant supplemented groups in studies reporting tumor response experienced the same or better response than the control group. No studies reported significantly worse survival or response in the antioxidant supplement group, as reported in our previous publication, which reviewed studies that reported tumor response or survival.14



Here's a PDF summary Block put out in '07:
Antioxidant-and-Chemotherapy Combo Shows Significant Benefits (http://polymva4patients.com/Antioxidant%20and%20Chemo-%20Article%201-%2010-9.pdf)