Preventive Effect of Curcumin Against Chemotherapy-Induced Side-Effects.

Zhijun Liu,Wingnang Leung,Haiyan Tian,Chuanshan Xu,Pengyun Huang,Siukan Law

doi:10.3389/fphar.2018.01374

Abstract

Cancer is still a severe threat to the health of people worldwide. Chemotherapy is one of main therapeutic approaches to combat cancer. However, chemotherapy only has a limited success with severe side effects, especially causing damage to normal tissues such as bone marrow, gastrointestine, heart, liver, renal, neuron, and auditory tissues, etc. The side-effects limit clinical outcome of chemotherapy and lower patients’ quality of life, and even make many patients discontinue the chemotherapy. Thus, there is a need to explore effective adjuvant strategies to prevent and reduce the chemotherapy-induced side effects. Naturally occurring products provide a rich source for exploring effective adjuvant agents to prevent and reduce the side effects in anticancer chemotherapy. Curcumin is an active compound from natural plant Curcuma longa L., which is widely used as a coloring and flavoring agent in food industry and a herbal medicine in Asian countries for thousands of years to treat vomiting, headache, diarrhea, etc. Modern pharmacological studies have revealed that curcumin has strong antioxidative, anti-microbial, anti-inflammatory and anticancer activities. Growing evidence shows that curcumin is able to prevent carcinogenesis, sensitize cancer cells to chemotherapy, and protect normal cells from chemotherapy-induced damages. In the present article, we review the preventive effect of curcumin against chemotherapy-induced myelosuppression, gastrointestinal toxicity, cardiotoxicity, hepatotoxicity, nephrotoxicity, neurotoxicity, ototoxicity, and genotoxicity, and discuss its action mechanisms.

Highlights

Cancer still a severe threat to the health of human is beings
Growing evidence show that curcumin can reduce chemotherapy-induced toxicity through clearing intracellular ROS in normal tissues and modulating a series of target molecules such as adhesion molecules, inflammatory factors, transcription and growth factors, apoptosis-related proteins, and some enzymes and kinases, etc. (Calabrese et al, 2003, 2008; Mohamad et al, 2009; Belcaro et al, 2014; Fetoni et al, 2014; Palipoch et al, 2014; Sheu et al, 2015; Sankrityayan and Majumdar, 2016; Banerjee et al, 2017; Ortega-Domínguez et al, 2017; Benzer et al, 2018; Dai et al, 2018)
The current evidence is mainly from the in vitro and in vivo animal experiments, few clinical trials have yet investigated the protective effect of curcumin against chemotherapy-induced toxicity (Mohajeri and Sahebkar, 2018)

Summary

Introduction

Cancer still a severe threat to the health of human is beings. The WHO recent report shows that cancer has become the second leading cause of death worldwide, almost 1 in 6 deaths are due to cancer in 2015 (World Health Organization [WHO], 2018). Cancer has been a severe public health problem worldwide. The drugs currently used in the chemotherapy only have a limited success with severe side-effects, including myelosuppression, gastrointestinal toxicity, cardiotoxicity, hepatotoxicity, neurotoxicity, ototoxicity, etc. These serious sideeffects make many patients discontinue the chemotherapy (Zhou et al, 2011; Salehi et al, 2014; Irving et al, 2015). There is a need to explore effective adjuvant strategies to prevent and reduce the chemotherapy-induced side effects

Objectives

Findings

Conclusion