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Sweet wormwood and its effect on PCa cells+Iron

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Posted 6/12/2018 7:59 PM (GMT 0)
Hello friends,

I found this article in internet and decided to share it here:

(note: my dad just decided to try treatment with this plant and I'm going to share the outcome here, after 1 month)

Artemisinin, a naturally occurring component of Artemisia annua, or sweet wormwood, is a potent anti-malaria compound that has recently been shown to have anti-proliferative effects on a number of human cancer cell types, although little is know about the molecular mechanisms of this response. We have observed that artemisinin treatment triggers a stringent G1 cell cycle arrest of LNCaP (lymph node carcinoma of the prostate) human prostate cancer cells that is accompanied by a rapid down-regulation of CDK2 and CDK4 protein and transcript levels. Transient transfection with promoter-linked luciferase reporter plasmids revealed that artemisinin strongly inhibits CDK2 and CDK4 promoter activity. Deletion analysis of the CDK4 promoter revealed a 231-bp artemisinin-responsive region between -1737 and -1506. Site-specific mutations revealed that the Sp1 site at -1531 was necessary for artemisinin responsiveness in the context of the CDK4 promoter. DNA binding assays as well as chromatin immunoprecipitation assays demonstrated that this Sp1-binding site in the CDK4 promoter forms a specific artemisinin-responsive DNA-protein complex that contains the Sp1 transcription factor. Artemisinin reduced phosphorylation of Sp1, and when dephosphorylation of Sp1 was inhibited by treatment of cells with the phosphatase inhibitor okadaic acid, the ability of artemisinin to down-regulate Sp1 interactions with the CDK4 promoter was ablated, rendering the CDK4 promoter unresponsive to artemisinin. Finally, overexpression of Sp1 mostly reversed the artemisinin down-regulation of CDK4 promoter activity and partially reversed the cell cycle arrest. Taken together, our results demonstrate that a key event in the artemisinin anti-proliferative effects in prostate cancer cells is the transcriptional down-regulation of CDK4 expression by disruption of Sp1 interactions with the CDK4 promoter.

Full article:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2629082

Hope to hear from the people who may have some comments/ experience.

Post Edited (Farz53) : 6/12/2018 3:07:25 PM (GMT-6)

Posted 6/12/2018 8:55 PM (GMT 0)
Are you thinking about supplementing artemisinin?
The Chinese pharmaceutical chemist Tu Youyou discovered artemisinin and its treatment of malaria. For her work, Tu received the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Artemisinin is an antioxidant. It sounds too good to be true that artemisinin would have cancer treatment capability. There is no scientific evidence yet.
Posted 6/12/2018 9:04 PM (GMT 0)
@Gemiln: As you say, I also believe it sounds too good to be true.

I just talked to my brother yesterday, one of his clients had a treatment with this supplement and he is doing really well. This client is an engineer and did a lot of research about this herb. It worked for him, but I agree it may not work for everyone.
Posted 6/12/2018 9:22 PM (GMT 0)
Here's what MSKCC says about it, with references. There is zero Clinical Trials evidence demonstrating its efficacy for Prostate Cancer in humans.

/www.mskcc.org/cancer-care/integrative-medicine/herbs/artemisia-annua

Charles
Posted 6/12/2018 9:37 PM (GMT 0)
I would drink absinthe instead.

Here's an article about its potential:
/www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2012/247597/
Posted 6/13/2018 3:15 PM (GMT 0)
Absinthe.......140 proof booze with a bad reputation.....Hey TA, in the article you posted I noticed that the dates on the footnotes are mostly 10, 15, 20 years old...So they have been kicking Artemisa around for a long time...But nobody wants to put up the money for an actual clinical trial....
Posted 6/13/2018 5:48 PM (GMT 0)
My supplement of choice is a two or three glasses of a good Chardonnay.
Posted 6/14/2018 1:05 AM (GMT 0)
There was a small pilot trial, but it didn't seem to do much (there was another small UK trial that never published results - presumably, it was ineffective)

/link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00280-018-3533-8

Given the unimpressive clinical trials to date, I don't think there's much interest in pursuing it.

Absinthe is kind of cool to drink because it is poured slowly (there's a special decanter with a small spigot) over a sugar cube held in a perforated absinthe spoon, and some places even have special absinthe glasses - quite a ceremony! A couple of years ago it was all the rage in high-end bars that serve craft cocktails (probably because of the publicity from Moulin Rouge) but that fad seems to have come and gone, at least in LA.
Posted 6/14/2018 5:09 AM (GMT 0)
A word of caution for those of you thinking about self-medicating with Absinthe: Recent research has shown that Absinthe contains a number of toxic chemicals. Of these the most dangerous is ethanol. There are other things that are toxic in large doses but the alcohol will have killed you long before you get anywhere near the worrisome doses of anything else.

Arguably, the second most dangerous substance is sucrose (if you use the preferred sugar-cube in an Absinthe spoon preparation method.) A safer alternative would be tagatose (a lower-calorie sugar) but you will probably need to find a source in Europe since the US market doesn't generally embrace sweeteners in cube form any more.
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