Berry promising anticancer prospects
By Janet Raloff
From San Diego, at the Experimental Biology 2000 meeting
Twelve years ago, scientists uncovered a mechanism to explain why the folk remedy of eating cranberries fights urinary tract infections. It now appears that the medicinal powers of the pucker-inducing berries might extend to breast cancer as well.
For years, Najla Guthrie and her colleagues at the University of Western Ontario in London have been exploring anticancer prospects of flavonoids, natural antioxidants, isolated from citrus juices (SN: 5/4/96, p. 287). Because deeply pigmented berries also contain dozens of such compounds—several with suspected anticancer activity—Guthrie recently turned to cranberries.