Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Regimens: Cancer Concerns in Big Doses of Folic Acid

Best way is to resort to Natural farming,no insecticides/pesticides, with optimum utilization of land.

Also take natural food with vitamins and do not load the body with vitamin tablets and syrups.

One curious fact.Use of folic acid retards cancer growth, excessive use spurs it. What is the correct dosage?Have the doctors been treating with out knowing this?

Story.

Grains and cereals have been fortified with folic acid in the United States since 1998, as part of an effort to reduce the incidence of neural tube birth defects in babies. But a new study has raised safety concerns, linking megadoses of the vitamin to increased cancer rates, particularly lung cancer.

The study was done in Norway, where foods are not fortified with folic acid, making it possible to compare outcomes among patients treated with supplements and a group given placebos.

Researchers followed 6,261 patients with ischemic heart disease who had participated in two randomized clinical trials set up to assess whether homocysteine-lowering treatment with folic acid and vitamin B12 reduced heart disease. The trials started in 1998 and ended in 2004 and 2005.

The latest study, published in the Nov. 18 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, monitored the same patients through 2007. It found that 10 percent of patients who had been treated with folic acid and vitamin B 12 had developed cancer, compared with 8.4 percent of those who had not received the treatment, an increased risk of 21 percent. The analysis indicated that the added risk was associated with high blood levels of folate, rather than vitamin B12.

While experimental evidence has indicated that folate deficiency may promote cancer growth, the study’s authors suggested it was also possible that excess folic acid accelerated the growth of tumors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/health/research/01regi.html?ref=health

[Via http://ramanan50.wordpress.com]

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