It had started out on a totally positive note. In March 2010, reports made the round online about research regarding the cancer fighting properties of papaya leaf extract. There were also several pieces featured in the press. UPI news service put up a short notice and a few of the bigger daily papers, like NY Daily News and the London Telegraph ran longer articles. All of these reports were based on a press release issued by the University of Florida in Gainesville about the work done by some of their staff.
In the line of this work it so happened that Dr. Dang and colleagues in Japan have documented, “Papaya’s dramatic anticancer effect against a broad range of lab-grown tumors, including cancer of the cervix, breast, liver, lung and pancreas. The researchers used an extract made from dried papaya leaves, and the anticancer effects were stronger when cells received larger doses of the tea.” But this is not all.
The press release continues, “In a paper published in the February 17th 2010 issue of the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, Dang and his colleagues also documented for the first time that papaya leaf extracts boosts the production of key signaling molecules called Th-1 type cytokines. This regulation of the immune system, in addition to papaya’s direct anti-tumor effect on various cancers, suggests possible therapeutic strategies that use the immune system to fight cancer.”
Furthermore, “The papaya extract did not have any toxic effects on normal cells, avoiding a common and devastating consequence of many cancer therapy regimens. The success of papaya extract in acting on cancer without toxicity is consistent with reports from indigenous populations in Australia and his native Vietnam.” All of which lead Dr. Dang to make the following statement, “Based on what I have seen and heard in a clinical setting, nobody who takes this extract experiences demonstrable toxicity; it seems like you could take it for a long time – as long as it is effective.”
You may ask, what exactly does papaya leaf extract do in order to stop and slowly reverse malignancies? Dr. Dang and his colleagues tried to find out. When they focused on a T-lymphoma cancer cell line they discovered the compound’s ability to cause malignant cells to perish, while leaving healthy cells unharmed.
This had already been previously confirmed in a study conducted by several research scientists at the Advanced Clinical Research Center of the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Tokyo Japan, and published in 2009. The aim of their study was to compare modern findings with anecdotes of patients with advanced cancers achieving remission following consumption of tea extract made from Carica Papaya leaves. With this goal in mind, Otsuki, Dang, Kumagai et al then systematically examined, “The effect of aqueous-extracted Carica Papaya leaf fraction on the growth of various tumor cell lines and on the anti-tumor effect of human lymphocytes. In addition, they attempted to identify the functional molecular weight fraction in the CP leaf extract.”
The result was that the group of research doctors observed significant growth inhibitory activity of the Caraica Papaya extract. Which lead them further to conclude that, “Papaya leaf extract may potentially provide the means for the treatment and prevention of selected human diseases such as cancer, various allergic disorders, and may also serve as immuno-adjuvant for vaccine therapy.”
The researchers hope to follow up these experiments by eventually testing the papaya cancer treatment in animal and human studies. They have applied to patent a process to distill the papaya extract through the University of Tokyo and they are working to identify specific compounds in the papaya extract that are active against cancer cells.
For the patient, such news has little to offer in terms of practical and useable results. It will take a long time for any new papaya based cure to surmount the obstacles put in the way of any new and probably more efficient approach to treating cancer. Special interests will see to that. However, who says that you cannot become proactive! Remember: it is not fate that metes out cancer lake a death sentence. Cancer IS a lifestyle disease par excellence – and therefore is partially of your own making (and for the other part a product of the larger environment that you have to live in). This being so, we can do something about it to prevent it from striking first.
From this perspective, the present article is just another encouragement to the individual for doing the needful, which because of some of the more recent environmental disasters of worldwide ramifications has become a matter of greater urgency that it ever was.