Can shark cartilage help fight cancer?

The byword "sharks don't get cancer" has become a ambulatory cry a part of bodies who amalgamation and advertise shark cartilage. A added accurate, if beneath stirring, byword would be "sharks do get cancer, but cipher knows absolutely how often." According to the National Blight Institute and the University of Pennsylvania, sharks accept been accepted to ache from melanomas, sarcomas, academician tumors, blight of the blood, and even blight of the cartilage.

Of course, the actuality that sharks do get blight doesn't necessarily beggarly the supplements are worthless. There is even some acumen for optimism. Since the 1970s, abounding test-tube and beastly studies accept begin that shark cartilage can stop or apathetic the growth of the claret argosy that augment tumors. (In a extraction that fabricated account in 1998, Dr. Judah Folkman of Children's Hospital in Boston begin that the drugs angiostatin and endostatin could compress tumors in mice through the aforementioned mechanism.) Cartilage may aswell be able to area off blight by preventing accident to the abiogenetic actual in advantageous cells.

Unfortunately, the triumphs of shark cartilage in the class accept not translated able-bodied to test of the animal body. A Cuban extraction covered on 60 Minutes begin that abounding blight patients "felt better" afterwards demography shark cartilage, but the National Blight Institute alleged the extraction "incomplete and unimpressive." A added contempo and absolute extraction of 379 lung blight patients, adjourned by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and the National Blight Institute, begin that shark cartilage supplements did not growth all-embracing adaptation rates. A 2005 extraction of 88 patients with avant-garde colorectal or breast blight analogously begin no benefit, although the extraction was chock-full aboriginal because bisected the patients couldn't abdomen the supplement.

After over two decades of such studies, there's still no assured affirmation that shark cartilage can action blight in humans.