I recently stumbled across the following headline in Scientific American:
Eating Soy Boosts Tamoxifen's Powers
Since I know of my fellow noders' interest, affection and even love
of the brown gold *, I thought it'd be appreciated if I relayed said information.
The magazine reports that a recent study strongly suggested what the
above headline says. This was presented at the annual conference of the American
Association of Cancer Research, New Orleans, last Wednesday.
"Tamoxifen" you say, "what is that?" Well,
if you for some reason don't want to read girlotron's excellent
writeup on the subject, let me just tell you that it's a "nonsteroidal
estrogen antagonist" used for treating breast cancer, specifically
estrogen-dependent tumors. It is also given prophylactically to some risk
groups.
As you can see, this is further evidence of what akf2000 mentions
under "Pros" in the previous writeup of this node. It turns out
that by combining soy and tamoxifen, cancer tumors in their
experiment was largely reduced compared to using only either of the two. The
experiment was performed on carcinogen-induced tumors in rats, and gave
the following result:
Reduction of
Medication number of tumors
---------- ----------------
Tamoxifen 29 %
Soy 37 %
Both
combined 62 %
My impression - given the results of the two "medications" by
themselves - would of course be that
Eating Tamoxifen Boosts Soy's Powers
but that wouldn't help funding cancer research, I guess. The
next step will be tests on humans, according to Andreas Constantinou of
University of Illinois, Chicago.
Source: Scientific American