Ciggyfree Blog

Green tea data show promise in treating small-cell lung carcinoma: Ingredient brings about cell death by reducing activity of key enzyme By Jeni Baker

The statistics are sobering. Small-cell lung carcinoma (SCLC), which represents 15-20 percent of all lung cancer cases, is fatal within five years in more than 85 percent of the patients who develop it. And because the disease typically becomes resistant to drug therapies, it is particularly insidious and difficult to treat.

That’s the bad news. The better news is that the active ingredient in green tea appears to arrest the disease’s progress at the cellular level, according to the results of a study* published in June.

What is it about green tea?

“Because no therapies work too well in treating SCLC, and this cancer tends to become drug-resistant fairly quickly, the prognosis for SCLC patients currently isn’t very good,” says primary investigator David Sadava, PhD, of the Claremont University Consortium’s Keck Science Center and the City of Hope Medical Center. “This study was about looking into other treatment options.”

Green tea was a natural choice. “There’s data that say it can prevent lung cancer, there are no side effects that I’m aware of, and it’s very widely consumed,” Sadava says. “And when you look at epidemiology and animal studies of many cancers, green tea is more effective than black tea in many ways.”

The active ingredients in green tea are antioxidants called catechins – and the most abundant type of catechin is epigallocatechin-3 gallate (EGCG).