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LE Magazine January 2002
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www.lef.orgLycopene lowers PSA in prostate cancer patients
Yet more evidence has surfaced that lycopene, a constituent of tomato sauce, fights prostate cancer, and more generally preserves the integrity of the cell. This is the first report to show that lycopene reduces prostate specific antigen (PSA), a measure of prostate cancer activity.
In this study, which was presented at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society (August, 2001), 32 mostly African American patients who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and were awaiting radical prostatectomy were put on diets that included enough tomato sauce to provide 30 mg/day of lycopene for three weeks. Prostate cancer is more frequent and serious among African Americans than among Caucasians.
Mean serum PSA concentrations fell by 17.5%, while a measure of oxidative status fell by 21.3%. DNA damage in the cancer cells fell by 40% after three weeks, of which author Phyllis E. Bowen says, “We don’t know whether that’s good or bad.” Most important, high concentration of lycopene in prostate tissues resulted in a nearly three-fold increase in programmed cell damage among cancer cells, which is a good thing.
“This is nice, because it establishes something you can do with these patients,” says Glen Bubley, an oncologist at the Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, who was not involved in the study. “[Lycopene] may be a real suppressor of prostate cancer growth.”
Two previous prospective studies had showed that men who eat lots of tomato sauce have a lower risk of prostate cancer than men who do not, and that they have an even lower risk of serious, more life-threatening forms of the cancer, says Bowen, who is a professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
An epidemiologic study first suggested that lycopene lowers prostate cancer risk in the mid-1990s.
—David Holzman
This article first appeared in January 2002 of Life Extension magazine,
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