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This is good for you!
My name is Luke Snelling and I'm a senior in Exercise and Sports Science.
I've been working with Dr. Emily Ho in the effects of
cruciferous vegetables on the reduction in prostate cancer.
Epidemiological studies have shown that cruciferous vegetables,
there's a positive correlation with the consumption of cruciferous vegetables
with the reduction of prostate cancer.
In 2009, the American Cancer Society said that prostate cancer
was the most diagnosed cancer among men. In addition, one in six men are
diagnosed with prostate cancer.
So, cruciferous vegetables. An example would be broccoli, cauliflower, kale.
What's good about cruciferous vegetables is there's a health benefit.
This health benefit has shown to be what we call GFN, or glucoraphanin.
There's various concentrations of GFN in various different cruciferous vegetables.
The highest would be in broccoli sprouts. What's attributed to this health benefit
or why this is important is through sulforaphane (SFN). Sulforaphane is a HDAC inhibitor.
Really quick, I will talk about how we can develop prostate cancer.
A couple mechanisms would be genetic. Genetic would be inheriting a mutated DNA.
Inheriting a mutated gene through the generations getting prostate cancer.
Another fact would be epigenetics. Epigenetics would be the change in
the expression of the gene through lifestyle changes. Such lifestyle changes
could be through nutrition or exercise. Sulforaphane and broccoli can play that
nutritional epigenetic role.
So really quick, I will just explain what HDAC inhibitor means and what all that is.
This shows overactive cancer. The DNA and the histones are in a closed configuration
so nothing can happen. When that HDAC inhibitor comes in
or sulforaphane comes in, it opens up the DNA histones, which then allows for
translation or the making of tumor suppressor genes.
These tumor suppressor genes can then kill prostate cancer cells.
So this is good. When we also metabolize broccoli
we get several metabolites or different forms of sulforaphane in the body.
SFN-NAC, the last metabolite, is the most abundant and the most prevalent in the urine.
So our hypothesis looked at both SFN and SFN-NAC on the reduction of prostate cancer.
How we did this experiment was we would take what we call split, or put about 10,000 cells
and cancer cells into a well. We would then treat with various concentrations of both
SFN and SFN-NAC, and then using various compounds and using a machine
we would then be able to measure the cell variability of the cancer of after using
SFN and SFN-NAC, which are both HDAC inhibitors.
As you can see, there's very similar results between SFN and SFN-NAC
at the various concentrations. So there's no difference in how they react with the cells.
As you can see, the higher the concentration of either compound the lower the cell variability occurred.
So why is this important? Well, it shows that cruciferous vegetables are important in
the preventing of prostate cancer. It's a good chemotherapeutic agent.
And another aspect was the mechanism which by I explained, by using
HDAC inhibitors as an epigenetic role to decrease prostate cancer has
been shown to be an effective agent.