brin blog: Current Event 2

Title: Diabetes Drug Might Fight Cancer

Introduction:

An ancient herbal remedy that constitutes the active ingredient in a modern diabetes drug may soon play a new role in fighting cancer and saving the world. This research was founded on September 7^th. The support was found earlier population studies suggesting that diabetes patients receiving the drug, called metformin, are less prone to develop cancer.

Fighting Cancer:

Metformin helps to stabilize blood sugar by decreasing the liver’s glucose (blood sugar, grape sugar, corn sugar) output and increasing the sugar’s use by muscle tissue. This was proven by Scott Lippman, an oncologist at the University of Texas with a M.D (master’s degree). It is estimated that already 40 million metformin drugs. In one of the new studies, Atsushi Nakajima of Yokohama City University School of Medicine in Japan and colleagues measured how metformin affected the development of tiny lesions in the colon cancer. Using colonoscopy data, the scientists identified 26 patients who had had polyps removed during a colonoscopy. The scientists randomly assigned some to get metformin and others to get a placebo. When the patients came back for their check up 9 patients had their lesions than they had before, but the other 17 that were proscribed placebo did not change. In the other study a U.S team induced lung cancer in mice with injections of a tobacco-based carcinogen. One week after the last shot, some mice were given either a low or a medium dose of metformin in their drinking water for 13 weeks. The tumor burden in these mice declined by 39 percent and 53 percent over that time, depending on the dose they received. When the researchers delivered an even higher dose of metformin, this time by injection, the tumor burden shrank by 72 percent, says study coauthor Phillip Dennis of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Masters Degree.

Conclusion:

I believe that Metoformin can help defeat cancer although I also believe that they should try to develop a better drug than metoformin but the same basics, so I think that metoformin can actually help people survive cancer, although they should try to improve the drug to make it more affective. Because the nine patients that were given metoformin were cured but they were not cured all the way.

Important Word:

1. Metformin