Bioactive Dietary Compounds and Epigenetics in Women's Reproductive Cancers

Abstract

Women's reproductive cancers are a group of cancers that initiate in women's reproductive system including the cervix, ovaries, uterus, vagina and vulva. There are different risk factors and etiological mechanisms that are involved in oncogenesis of gynecologic malignancies. Exploration of effective chemopreventive and therapeutic approaches that are universally applied in most gynecologic cancers will be critically important and benefit women's welfare. In the last two decades, novel strategies that target epigenetics-related molecular events have emerged as one of the major cancer prevention and therapies employed by dietary phytochemicals. These bioactive dietary components found in fruits and vegetables such as green tea, soybean, cruciferous vegetables, grapes and certain Asian spices have shown potent inhibitory activities against human cancer including female reproductive cancers. More important, these bioactive dietary compounds can elicit their chemopreventive/therapeutic properties through, at least in part, modulation of epigenetic processes including histone modification, DNA methylation and non-coding RNA expression during carcinogenesis. Given the fact that epigenetic aberrations dynamically contribute to cancer pathogenesis, reversal of abnormal epigenetic codes and their-induced gene expression profiles by bioactive dietary compounds could be an effective approach for gynecologic cancer prevention and therapy. In this review, we will discuss the advances in understanding the epigenetic effects of dietary phytochemicals on gene expression during cancer development, and how these epigenetics diets help to improve cancer prevention and treatment efficacy in major gynecologic cancers.