|
Jeremy Moore
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
High magnesium intake has been associated with low risk of
colorectal cancer. Americans have similar average magnesium intake as
East Asian populations. If that were all that were involved, observers
might expect both groups to have similar risk for colorectal cancer.
However, the United States has seen a much higher colorectal cancer
incidence rate than East Asian populations. Furthermore, when East
Asians immigrated to the United States, their incidence rates for
colorectal cancer increased. This led researchers at Vanderbilt
University to suspect there was something else at work.
Calcium supplementation has been shown to inhibit colorectal
carcinogenesis although high calcium may simultaneously be preventing
the body from absorbing magnesium. United States patients have a higher
calcium intake and higher colorectal cancer incidence. "If calcium
levels were involved alone, you'd expect the opposite direction. There
may be something about these two factors combined – the ratio of one to
the other – that might be at play", said Qi Dai, M.D., Ph.D., assistant
professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University.
Dai and colleagues examined this hypothesis in a large clinical
trial and found indeed that supplementation of calcium only reduced the
risk of adenoma recurrence if the ratio of calcium to magnesium was low
and remained low during treatment. "The risk of colorectal cancer
adenoma recurrence was reduced by 32 percent among those with baseline
calcium to magnesium ratio below the median in comparison to no
reduction for those above the median," said Qi.
The implications for prevention of adenoma recurrence or reduced
risk of primary colorectal cancer is that designing a personalized
diet/supplementation regimen that takes the ratio of both nutrients
into account may be better than supplementing with one or the other
alone.
About one in eighteen individuals will develop colorectal cancer in
their lifetime and 40 percent will die within five years of diagnosis,
mainly due to diagnosis at a late stage. The understanding of how
dietary factors affect colorectal cancer may lead to the prevention of
cancer recurrence and possibly prevention of the initial cancer.
Source: American Association for Cancer Research
|
Click here to search for cholesterol content of foods
