There's some breaking news over at Scientific American, and it's pretty startling: apparently the results yielded by a three-year study, unveiled on Saturday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, are that arsenic yeah, the poison kind may be a major key in beating your deadlier forms of cancer into submission.
Standard treatment for APL -- a form of acute myeloid leukemia that strikes 1,500 people a year in the United States -- involves chemotherapy and a form of vitamin A called all-trans retinoic acid, which helps 70 to 80 percent of patients gain long-term remission.
About 25 percent of those patients, however, relapse and no longer respond to treatment. Those patients often get arsenic trioxide.
But in a study sponsored by The National Cancer Institute, Powell and colleagues paired arsenic with standard treatment in newly diagnosed patients.
They found that 81 of 261 patients in the arsenic group were free of disease after three years, compared with 66 of 257 patients in the group who got the standard regimen alone.
"Among those who actually got arsenic, only five patients, or 2 percent, relapsed," Powell said. "This is very impressive."
Seriously. That is seriously impressive. What seems to be happening, according to the article, is that while traditional chemotherapy just goes in and kind of kills everything it can, the arsenic appears to "kill preferentially," zeroing in on cancer cells like a sniper. One could argue that, like a sniper, arsenic is a very precise killer and therefore a pretty scary drug to give to someone even in the most dire and desperate of circumstances. When you consider, however, that chemotherapy was born from mustard gas, it's really all relative. The researchers are also quick to point out what should be obvious: that the dosage is much smaller than what it would take to kill anyone. (Otherwise, it would kind of defeat the purpose.)
It's all still very much in the experimental phases and due for much more research and testing, and doctors haven't come to a consensus yet on whether the arsenic trioxide treatments will be used before or after or in conjunction with or altogether separate from traditional chemotherapy, but at the very least it is progress. In this kind of field, any sort of progress is very, very good.
Apparently arsenic has been used as a remedy in China for thousands of years; _DictionaryGirl_ wonders how this news story could possibly be spun to work in favor of the antifreeze-in-the-toothpaste guys.
it's amazing all the cancer treatments that have been coming out in the last year and a half. It'll be good to see them actually out and in use. I hope it doesn't take long, but I'm worried that hospitals and doctors would prefer to see the treatments tested and retested and will be scared to be the first to offer them should they fail.
As someone with a parent with cancer, it's beyond disheartening to see the toll that chemo and radiation therapy take on a person. these alternatives are long overdue.
maybe the Chinese will introduce Arsenic into the toothpaste and market it as an anticancer paste? and wasn't Arsenic, in small doses, an aphrodisiac? or did I just read that somewhere a long time ago?
When my Mom was in treatment for cancer. I told her "chemo-therapy is poison, they try to kill the cancer faster thn the patient". It totally makes sense that they use straight poison.
Arsenic has a long history as a medicine. The german word for doctor (Arzt) is derived from it. That being said, many arsenic compounds are carcinogenic. (Don't worry kids, t's mostly the inorganic ones, unlike arsenic trioxide.)
_DictionaryGirl_
NEWSWIRE
San Diego, CA
JUN 02, 2007 11:22 PM