Fish Oil: Melanoma Growth Halted By The DHA in Fish Oil
Posted by Michael Byrd on Apr 24 2007 | Tagged as: Fish Oil
DHA (docosahexaenoic acid), an omega 3 fatty acid found only in fish oil, has been found to suppress cancer growth, including melanoma.
That’s good news for the more than 8,000 men and women who die each year from melanoma (malignant skin cancer).This number is growing as the baby boomer generation ages.
Anyone can get melanoma. In fact, among young people, it’s one of the most common cancers. But the risk increases rapidly with age.
More than one million Americans get skin cancer each year, with 60,000 of these cases being the dangerous melanoma form. That’s why it’s so important to take precaution when getting out in the sun.
Eating lots of fatty fish may also slow down melanoma growth by as much as 50 percent. That’s the conclusion of researchers from the American Health Foundation and the New York Medical College. They recently discovered that DHA clearly inhibits the growth of human melanoma cells. (Cancer Research, Vol. 60: 4139-45)
Melanoma is a very serious form of skin cancer, but if found and treated early, the chance of recovery is very good.
If melanoma is not found and treated in time, however, it can grow deeper and spread to other parts of the body – i.e. metastasize. It then becomes very difficult to treat and life-threatening.
There’s growing evidence that diet has a strong affect on developing melanoma.
Many scientists, for example, believe that a high dietary intake of omega 6 fatty acids from plant based corn, safflower, sunflower and soybean cooking oils stimulate the growth of melanoma and other cancer cells.
Fish oil omega 3 fatty acids (particularly DHA), on the other hand, have been found in several studies to suppress the growth of melanoma and other cancer cells.
Most of this research was laboratory test tube studies, but the various research teams agreed that fish oil DHA could be an effective melanoma treatment and that further clinical studies would be helpful.
That sounds like it makes sense to me.
