Some 750,000 people die of liver cancer each year, most before age 50, and more 80 percent of them lived in developing countries, according to the National Institutes of Health. Researchers are looking at the way aflatoxin consumption, combined with hepatitis and other factors, are leading to more cancer diagnoses.
“Liver cancer is one of the most profoundly important cancers on our planet,” said John Groopman, a Johns Hopkins professor of oncology and public health said in a recent lecture. He and colleagues are documenting a two-pronged approach—reducing consumption and chemical detoxification—in high-risk human populations.
An MIT-trained toxicologist, Groopman, who also trained at NCI’s Division of Cancer Cause and Prevention years ago, and his team focused on natural products as interrupters of the metabolic path by which aflatoxin produces dangerous DNA adducts that promote cancer.
“The challenge was finding foods with enough compounds to modify protective enzymatic pathways,” he said. “Our colleagues found that broccoli turned out to be most useful.”
Check out the NIH coverage of the talk. A link to the video is at the bottom of the page.