Abstract
Tocotrienols, found in several natural sources such as rice bran, annatto seeds, and palm oil have been reported to exert various beneficial health promoting properties especially against chronic diseases, including cancer. The incidence of cancer is rapidly increasing around the world not only because of continual aging and growth in global population, but also due to the adaptation of Western lifestyle behaviours, including intake of high fat diets and low physical activity. Tocotrienols can suppress the growth of different malignancies, including those of breast, lung, ovary, prostate, liver, brain, colon, myeloma, and pancreas. These findings, together with the reported safety profile of tocotrienols in healthy human volunteers, encourage further studies on the potential application of these compounds in cancer prevention and treatment. In the current article, detailed information about the potential molecular mechanisms of actions of tocotrienols in different cancer models has been presented and the possible effects of these vitamin E analogues on various important cancer hallmarks, i.e., cellular proliferation, apoptosis, angiogenesis, metastasis, and inflammation have been briefly analyzed.
Highlights
Cancer is a devastating and often fatal disease with an ever increasing incidence rate all over the world [1,2,3]
Alpha(α)-TAolcpohtar(iαen)-oTlocotrienol ocotrienols, the unsaturated vitamin E analogues, which are found in several natural sources suBcehtaa(sβr)i-cTeobBcroeatnar,(ieβan)n-oTnloactototrsieeneodls and palm oil [35,36]
Another report suggested that tocotrienols can induce apoptosis in breast cancer cell lines via upregulation of DR5 that was dependent on JNK and p38 MAPK activation and mediated through endoplasmic reticulum stress [47]
Summary
Cancer is a devastating and often fatal disease with an ever increasing incidence rate all over the world [1,2,3]. Several natural compounds have been observed to exert antioxidant, antiproliferative, pro-apoptotic, anti-inflammatory, anti-angiogenic, anti-invasive, and anti-metastatic activities, acting as potential chemopreventive or chemotherapeutic agents [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26] One such group of compounds are tocotrienols, the unsaturated vitamin E analogues, which are found in several natural sources such as rice bran, annatto seeds and palm oil [27,28].
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