You can buy DCA (sodium dichloroacetate) online. But should you?
Touted as a simple, inexpensive cure for cancer, DCA kills some cancer cells when there is lots of oxygen. But when oxygen levels are low — a condition called hypoxia— DCA may actually increase growth of colorectal cancer tumors.
Dr. Brenda Coomber and her team at the University of Guelph in Canada found that in areas of tumors without much oxygen, DCA actually protected colorectal cancer cells from dying rather than killing them and tumors in mice grew.
Dr. Coomber treated colorectal cancer cells lines with DCA under normal oxygen conditions and when oxygen was low. With normal oxygen, DCA caused cancer cells to die, but there was less cell death with low oxygen.
When the tumor cells were implanted in mice, DCA actually caused tumors to grow in areas of low oxygen.
DCA is a prescription medicine used to treat a rare metabolic disorder in children that affects the way mitochondria in cells produce energy.
Mitochondria create oxygen radicals that are part of normal cell death. Some researchers think that DCA can force cancer cells to use mitochondria pathways leading to their death, while sparing normal tissues.
What Dr. Coomber’s team found was that this is partly true when oxygen levels are normal, but something very different happens when oxygen is depleted, as it is in many tumors.
She said,
Sodium dichloroacetate is not very effective at killing some kinds of cancer cells and, in fact, it has the opposite effect and could even make things worse.
Further, Dr. Coomber warned,
We are only beginning to tease these things out. DCA may well turn out to be an effective treatment in some cases, but it’s not necessarily safe in all cases. There are people out there buying this drug off the Internet and self-medicating — who knows what’s going on in their tumour? They might actually be making it worse.
Read more about her research at the University of Guelph.
SOURCE: Shazrzad et al., Cancer Letters, Volume 297, Number 1, November 1, 2010.
Leave a Reply
Your comments are welcome. However, specific medical advice will not be provided. Generic QUESTIONS can be directed to our Answer Line team at http://fightcolorectalcancer.org/awareness/answer-line or by calling us at 1-877-427-2111 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM Eastern time, Monday – Friday. We urge you to consult with a qualified physician for diagnosis and for answers to your personal questions. Fight Colorectal Cancer is not responsible for the medical accuracy of any comments left by persons other than Fight Colorectal Cancer staff members. Fight Colorectal Cancer staff members monitor comments and may respond publicly where appropriate.
Please note that we automatically publish the name that you enter next to your post. Also note that our pages are automatically indexed by Google and other search engines, and your name may therefore appear in search results on those sites. So if you wish to remain anonymous please use a different name or enter 'Anon' as the name.
We regret that we are unable to privately answer questions left as comments. So please do not include your phone number, email or mailing address in the body of your comment.