Vitamin E May Cause Cancer In Some People

A study done by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital have made a peculiar revelation on the effects of vitamin E. Depending on an individual's COMT gene, vitamin E can increase or decrease chances of getting cancer. Kathryn Hall, PhD, MPH, from the division of Preventive Medicine at Brigham and her colleagues inspected cancer rates of women during a 10 year trial and continued another 10 years after. Those women with the met-met COMT variant who had taken vitamin E had a 14% lower rate of cancer. On the other hand, the val-val variant had a 15% higher rate of cancer.

I am truly stunned at how a vitamin, which is essential to the body, may play a factor in cancer. I learned vitamin E had many benefits such as anti-inflammatory, improves immune system, and prevents heart disease. This prompts the question, do other vitamins or nutrients that are so-called beneficial have the potential to influence cancer and/or other diseases? Further studies should definitely make it clearer as to how to approach this issue.   

The placebome: Where genetics and the placebo effect meet

Does genetics play a role in the placebo effect?

The use of a placebo has been present in randomized clinical trials to show the effect of a new drug related treatment for years. With the uprise in genomic studies researchers have learned that an individuals response to a placebo can be modified by a persons genetics. In the article researchers from the Program in Placebo Studies (PiPS) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Woman’s Hospital (BWH) have explored the evidence of placebo studies and introduced the concept of “the placebome.” The placebome is a term used to denote the study of genomic effects on the placebo response and the article provides concepts for future research and discussion for the role of the placebome in health care.
As the article explains it is known that genetic variations in the brain’s neurotransmitter pathways modify placebo effects and by identifying plaebo biomarkers we can show these variations. Catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) is a biomarker that has an influence on the brains levels of dopamine, and therefore the extent of an individuals placebo response. Research has also shown that there is genetic variation in other neurotransmitter pathways that could modify ones response to the placebo including: opioid, endocannabanoid and serotonin pathways. This shows that a network of genes may be responsible for this effect.

This new knowledge has allowed researchers to pose questions such as the relationship between placebo-drug interactions, of which I found very interesting. It was mentioned that the neurotransmitter pathways at work are the same in both the placebo and the drug. For this reason the response of the drug could have been modified by the placebo, or vice-versa. I found this article intriguing because the implications of these placebo-drug interactions means that there may be a discrepancy in the validity of clinical drug trials. I am interested to see if placebo control groups will be altered in any way in the future.

Primary article can be found here