Vitamin D may reduce progression of low-grade prostate cancer

The tumor’s aggressiveness after a prostate biopsy was measured on Gleason Grading System, and tumors with Gleason scores of 7 and above were considered aggressive and likely to spread whereas those with a score of 6 and below considered less aggressive.

Bruce Hollis, scientist at the Medical University of South Carolina, said that low-grade prostate cancer could be cured with surgery and that a person should wait for 60 days from the time of his biopsy, to undergo prostatectomy.

Hollis’s team had assigned 37 men undergoing elective prostatectomies, one group received 4,000 U of Vitamin-D per day while the placebo group didn’t receive vitamin D, and then after a period of 60 days their prostate glands were removed and examined.

Preliminary results indicated that men who had received Vitamin D intake showed improvements whereas the other group either stayed the same or got worse, thus suggesting that Vitamin-D had caused dramatic changes in the expression levels of many cell lipids and proteins.

Hollis added that cancer was mainly associated with inflammation and that Vitamin D had the capacity to fight inflammation within the gland, though nothing has been known on whether the Vitamin could treat or just prevent prostate cancer but it appeared that it kept low-grade prostate cancer from being ballistic.

The research would recently be described at the 249th National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).