A Mushrooms And Complement To Cancer Research

Mushrooms as a benefit for the human body have its roots in ancient times. Although many cultures still fear the poisonous side of mushrooms, there are many cultures especially in the East that uses mushrooms in their everyday lives. Chinese and Japanese people have been using mushrooms in the form of herbal teas for its many health benefits.

Today, mushrooms have been embraced by many countries around the world. Besides being made as tea for therapy, it is widely used in the kitchen as well. It can be added for flavor in many dishes like stews, pasta, and even as a condiment ingredient as in mushroom sauce. As effective mushrooms are in the kitchen, scientists today are carefully doing research on the capability of mushrooms to help battle cancer.

Various studies around the world are dedicated to mushrooms and its capabilities to battle cancer.

Today, there are a few studies around the world particularly in the United States and in Australia that have somehow produced breakthroughs in this type of study. These studies will be discussed in the succeeding paragraphs.

Discovering mushrooms medicinal effects are one of the advocacies of many scientists today. A compound from a mushroom found in southwest China called verticilli A has been discovered to be a great complement to the drug TRAIL. Also known as Tumor Necrosis Factor-related apoptosis inducing ligand, TRAIL is a drug capable of making cancers cells self destruct. Dr. Kebin Liu, a cancer immunologist at George Health Sciences University, has done research by using mice as test subjects.

Results have produced good results as the compound verticilli A has not allowed cancer cells to resist the effects of TRAIL, a trait most tenacious cancer cells are known for.

Meanwhile, in Australia, researchers have shed some light on battling prostate cancer. Dr. Patrick Ling of the Australian Prostate Cancer Research Centre-Queensland and Institute for Biomedical Health & Innovation (IHBI) at Queensland University of Technology has done research by using transgenic mice and feeding them polysaccharopeptide (PSP), a compound extracted from ‘turkey tail’ mushrooms. Tests have shown that 100 percent of the tumor has not developed for the 20 weeks that the mice were fed with PSP. Dr. Ling said no tumors were found on the mice. Turkey tail mushrooms are widely used in Asia for mushrooms medicinal benefits.