For this reason, cancer is today viewed as a metabolic disease and not only as a cellular disease. Prostate cancer makes no exception; in fact, this mitochondrial mutation can increase the aggressivity of prostate cancer (7).
Restoring the mitochondrial function and cellular respiration using several dietary agents, enzymes, vitamins, and minerals is an important step that permits us to combat cancer with more efficiency (8).
Chemotherapy and Hormonotherapy are Not the Best Answer
The use of hormones and or chemotherapeutic drugs could only extend the lives of these men by months or a few years at best and often with pain and poor quality of life. I believe that treating any cancer first needs a complete image of the whole patient. Our approach includes dietary compounds and a molecular approach to underline the mechanism of both apoptosis and anti-apoptotic genes or inhibitors.
These, in turn, indicate the balance between cancer cells self-destroyed by chemotherapy and the resistance of other populations of cancer cells to apoptosis.
Usually, I work with molecular markers blood testing where the reader can refer to one of my articles called, “The Molecular Basis of Prostate Cancer and Targeting Therapies,” Published in Townsend Letter August-September 2017. Here I explain in detail the various mechanisms of prostate cancer and suggested therapies.
Survivin, a New Inhibitor of Apoptosis, is Highly Activated in Prostate Cancer
Citing just one example, survivin is a gene inhibitor of apoptosis only activated in cancer tissue, but not in healthy tissue. Therefore survivin becomes a new cancer biomarker and a new molecule for early detection, diagnostics, and prognosis of various types of cancer (8, 9). In all the cases described, the survivin tests were always highly activated and therefore contribute to chemotherapy resistance to apoptosis, cancer cell destruction, and tumor aggressivity (10).
The level of survivin is different from one patient to another, having shown that each patient is an individual and needs personalized therapy. This is why conventional therapies often fail because they are adapted to focus on the tumor and not to the patient’s bodily defense mechanisms.
I cannot begin to tell you how many times I’ve seen a patient going under surgery for prostate cancer and 3 months later the PSA starts to increase! Usually, it is because some remaining cancer cells developed mutated P53 protein that blocks apoptosis, and their cancer cells start to activate.
Prostate Cancer Prevention through Selected Natural Dietary Compounds
Many natural dietary compounds have been found to possess anticancer activity by regulating, activating, or inhibiting several genes, and pro-inflammatory factors called cytokines, including P53, Bax, BcL2, survivin, MMP’s, TGF-B, NF-KB, Cox2, PI3K, Caspases, while stimulating the immune defense.
Apoptosis is the first step that occurs in the destruction of abnormal/cancer cells through the P53 tumor suppressor gene, considered as an anticancer therapy (11). Evidence indicates that dietary bioactive agents may trigger apoptosis through numerous molecule targets describe above.