When it comes to her health, actress, anti-aging expert and best-selling author Suzanne Somers doesn’t hesitate to reject conventional treatments. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer 11 years ago she chose alternative therapies that stunned the mainstream medical community.  Once again, she’s taken the revolutionary route by undergoing an experimental procedure using her own stem cells and body fat to rebuild her withered breast.

Somers detailed her alternative journey and boasted about her quality of life to Dr. Oz on his show last Friday.

“Look at me,” she told Dr. Oz. “Eleven years later, I am so healthy. I’ve had this incredible quality of life all of these years.”

After she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000 it took about two days for her to recover from the shocking news.

“I woke up, looked at my husband and said, ‘I can handle this.’ And then it was like I went to war and I was going to do it my way,” she said.

And so she did. She was offered the standard of care: a lumpectomy, radiation, chemotherapy and after-care drugs and told to give up bioidentical hormones, which she refused to do despite her doctor telling her she would die if she didn’t. She believed keeping her hormones balanced would help her prevent a cancer recurrence following the lumpectomy.

But she did agree to radiation, which she was told would be a “walk in the park.” Hardly. She vomited daily throughout each day and spent much of the time curled in a fetal position. The radiation eventually left her with a “withered, nearly pancake breast on the right side (barely a B cup) and my full natural breast on the left side (a D cup),” she writes on her website.

“Here I am a sex symbol and I have one and one-third breasts,” she said to Dr. Oz. “…I could write a book, What They Don’t Tell You about Radiation.
After researching chemotherapy and being dissatisfied with its success rate, or lack thereof, she rejected that treatment. “Looking back, it was the best thing I ever did,” she said.

To help prevent a recurrence of cancer, she was injected with Iscador, which is extracted from mistletoe, for eight years. She also “ate as if my life depended on it” and still does. She grows her own food, buys organic and when she can’t get organic she loads up on antioxidants to kill free radicals.  She also continued taking her bioidentical hormones and opted against reconstruction because she didn’t want an implant.

“As an avid participant in anti-aging and alternative medicine, I instead searched for another option. I heard about Dr. Kotaro Yoshimura who has been performing stem cell breast reconstruction in Japan, but it was not legally available to women in this country. After years of research and international travel, I was able to assist a remarkable group of doctors in having an IRB (International Review Board) set up at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in California. I considered going to Japan for the surgery, but I wanted to help open the door for women in America. I am proud to say I am the first person in this country to initiate the clinical trial for a stem cell breast reconstruction at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Joel Aronowitz (who trained with Yoshimura in Japan) was the lead surgeon, along with Dr. James Watson. This procedure used my own adult stem cells, harvested from my fat, then reinjected into my breast to “regrow” my breast to its original size. While I don’t yet have long-term results, I can say the initial results are nothing short of miraculous.”

If ever there was a poster child for alternative therapies and being in control of your own health, it is Somers, who says, “It is so wonderful for all people to know how your body works and to understand the fuel, which is in good nutrition, and to know the questions to ask when you are having any kind of procedure so that you can be in charge of your body because nobody will care as much about your body as you.”

Mistletoe Extract as Cancer Therapy

Benefits of Stem Cell Breast Reconstruction

Joan Valentine - A Foundation for Natural Cures, Inc. - Provides education and integrative medicine solutions to those suffering from cancer and their families.

By Dr. Mitchell Gaynor
Founder and President, Gaynor Integrative Oncology
Asst. Clinical Professor of Medicine, Weill-Cornell Medical College

Cancer is a scary diagnosis. There’s no doubt about that. Treatment is not just about removing the tumor and providing chemotherapy (although those are important aspects of healing cancer patients) – it’s about the whole patient. As an integrative oncologist, I emphasize treating the person and not just cancer. I incorporate conventional medicine using chemotherapy, monoclonal antibodies, and targeted therapies with nutritional forms of treatment to create unique therapeutic regimens for my patients.

Recently, Suzanne Somers appeared on The Dr. Oz Show to discuss the cancer treatments she used to treat her breast cancer. One of the adjuvant therapies she discussed was her use of mistletoe extract injections. Although it’s not FDA-approved in the US, it is used in some clinical research trials and occasionally prescribed in Europe by anthroposophic physicians.

Mistletoe: More than Holiday Décor

Mistletoe is a semiparasitic plant that receives it nourishment by growing on apple, birch, elm, maple, oak, pine and several other trees. The plant contains chlorophyll and is capable of undergoing photosynthesis. Its use extends far beyond being a symbol of an impromptu holiday kiss – it has medicinal purposes as well. It been used to treat medical conditions such as arthritis, epilepsy, hypertension, menopause and even cancer. Mistletoe has a plethora of medicinal applications that date back to Ancient Greece. However, it started to gain attention as a chemotherapeutic agent in the 1920s.

The Science Behind the Effects of Mistletoe

Cancer, in the simplest terms, is a group of cells that are unable to die like normal cells. Our cells go through a process called apoptosis, which means cell death. This is the checks and balances our body uses to remove old cells that may not be up to par. And without apoptosis, old cells, which are not at their optimal state, don’t function as well as new cell. This leads to impaired functions and systems can begin to fail in the body.

Phytonutrients, such as the extracts of mistletoe, have been shown to restore the capacity of cancer cells to die so that they don’t continue to grow unchecked. Laboratory studies have shown that mistletoe extracts are proapoptotic toward cancer cells, meaning that they promote cell death.

Mistletoe also revs up your immune system, a crucial, complex system of cells and organs that are necessary to fight infection and disease, which is important to prevent cancer. Because of its potential therapeutic effects, mistletoe has been categorized as a biologic response modifier, which refers to its ability to fuel the body’s immunologic response.

Unabated cell growth, however, is just one way that cancer cells grow. Another process called angiogenesis, which is the growth and supply of cells with new blood vessels, ensures that cancer cells are nourished. Mistletoe extracts have been shown to also target cancer cells by blocking the formation of new blood vessels. While many natural products have effects on cancer cells in a dish, this does not always mean efficacy in real life.

It’s What’s In (Not Who’s Under) the Mistletoe

Mistletoe is a widely researched complementary and alternative medicinal agent. The majority of the mistletoe extracts that are used to treat cancer in patients originate from Europe; they have a variety of brand names: Iscador (Iscar), Eurixor, Helixor, Isorel (Vysorel), Iscucin, Lektinol (Plenosol) and Abnoba-viscum.

Various factors influence the composition of mistletoe: its host tree; harvest season; mistletoe species; method used to obtain mistletoe extract (i.e. fermented vs. unfermented); and preparatory methods used by manufacturers.

Understanding how mistletoe may help to treat cancer starts with knowing what compounds make up the plant:

Alkaloids are mainly found in plants and some fungi. These are nitrogen-based substances that are found in products such as coffee and vincristine, which is also an anti-cancer drug.

Viscotoxins are small proteins synthesized by mistletoe that are proapoptotic (encouraging programmed cell death) and stimulates immunity.

Lectins produced by the mistletoe plant are glycoproteins, meaning it contains both sugars and proteins. This substance can bind outside of cells and trigger biochemical changes within the cells.

Studies on Mistletoe and Cancer

In Germany, the use of mistletoe is widespread as the bill is footed by the health-care system. German researchers performed a meta-analysis in which they reviewed the effects of Iscador, a commonly used form of mistletoe extract, on survival of cancer patients. The researchers reported that the data they examined showed a lower risk of mortality.¹

The increasing interest in using mistletoe extract to treat cancer has lead to more and more systematic reviews of human trials. Because it can be difficult to statistically pool these studies due to the varying methodologies, researchers implemented special criterion to include or exclude certain studies. After using eight databases to identify clinical trials in which mistletoe extract was used to treat cancer, one review conducted in 2003 concluded that there wasn’t substantive evidence to support the clinical efficacy of mistletoe extract in cancer treatment.

One of the criticisms of the data reviewed in this study pointed out that while mistletoe extracts have been show to stimulate the activity of molecules such as tumor necrosis factor alpha and interleukins (i.e. interleukins 1 and 6), which that have inhibitory effects on cancer cell growth and metastasis, the data mostly comes from preclinical trials and may not have the same effects on cancer patients in clinical trials.

Another study examined 16 men and women with pancreatic cancer. Because pancreatic cancer is resistant to chemotherapy and radiation, it is associated with a poor prognosis. The pancreatic cancer had metastasized (spread) to either the lymph nodes or other organs. The researchers reported that the subcutaneous administration of mistletoe did not change tumor growth; however, the plant extract did help to minimize quality of life concerns in the patients’ final months.³

Natural killer (NK) cells are white blood cells that make up your immune cells, and they are responsible for fighting foreign cells and cancer cells. Major surgery inhibits NK cell activity. The suppression of natural killer cells in cancer patients may lead to tumor cells spreading. In a clinical trial, the infusion of mistletoe before surgery was shown to prevent the inhibition of NK cell activity.

Mistletoe extract has also been shown to have some efficacy for superficial bladder cancer, and it was not associated with any side effects compared to the use of Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG)treatment, which is a commonly used, effective adjuvant treatment (BCG does have serious side effects).⁵ However, this study is small and the follow-up limited.

In a review of randomized and non-randomized control trials, the efficacy of a type of mistletoe extract called Viscum album was assessed to determine whether or not it improved on quality-of-life parameters in patients with cancer. The researchers reported that the plant improved on quality-of-life measures such as sleep, exhaustion, depression and anxiety; it also reduced the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

Limitations of Research

An Internet search using the phrase “mistletoe and cancer research” resulted in over 133,000 hits. There’s no doubt of a growing interest in the use of mistletoe as an adjuvant form of treatment for cancer. However, as you scour the Web for information on mistletoe and cancer, understand that not all research is created equally. It’s important to look out for red flags to determine the strength of research and the validity of the findings.

In all likelihood you’ll be reading about research findings through a secondary source such as a newspaper or health website. Here’s a quick list of items to keep in mind as you read news articles or websites:

• Where was the study published originally?
• Have there been human studies, or are the studies solely laboratory-based experiments?
• How was the clinical trial designed? An important clue to remember is that the gold standard is a double blind, randomized placebo-controlled trial?
• Is the population size small or large?
• Was the study limited to specific gender or socioeconomic factors?
• Is the research new information that needs to be replicated?

This should give you an idea of some basic things to consider. As you come across research that may be exciting and holds new promise, be sure to think about these questions.

Panacea for Cancer? Not So Fast.

The medical front on the use of mistletoe is not a united one. There are many reasons for this. Mistletoe extract has been used as an adjunct for  treating cancer because of the anticancer substances it’s composed of. European anthoposophic physicians often prescribe it, and various mistletoe extracts are also marketed. However, It is the variability in the preparation of the extract that also makes it difficult to interpret the clinical findings of studies because the relative proportions of the cancer-fighting constituents differs depending on what brand is used.

Based on review studies, the findings on the effects of mistletoe extract is a mixed bag of results because they include different study designs and variable plant extracts. And while most studies don’t report any serious side effects, other research has reported adverse effects, such as localized reactions at the site of injection, anaphylaxis, kidney failure and ulcerations.

While some studies suggest that mistletoe can slow or stop tumor growth and improve survival in cancer patients, the design of most of these studies are weak. Without strong methodology, research studies are more likely to produce positive results. Consequently, independent reviewers have largely failed to support the efficacy of mistletoe extract use in cancer because of insufficient evidence.

The verdict is still out on the efficacy of mistletoe extract and more solid research is needed to assess its use as an anticancer agent.

In the meantime, let me impart some advice that I share with my patients about health and cancer – the most overlooked of all modalities is what you eat. Because your genes can turn “on” and “off” cellular signals that lead to cancer, eating more natural foods like phytonutrients (plant-based foods) will help to promote turning on the right genes that will lead to a healthier you.

Over the last 30 years, I have studied the mechanism of hundreds of bioactive nutrients on cancer-related gene expression, as well as signaling proteins and transcription factors that also effect these genes. These nutrients have powerful effects on inflammation, hormone regulation, toxin metabolism, cell growth and angiogenesis – all at the level of our gene expression. In targeted nutritional program for my patients, I focus on several areas:

• Nutrients that lower the 3 main cancer promoters: AP-1, NF-kappa-B, and IGF.
• Nutrients that inhibit the main cancer promoting enzymes; tyrosine kinase, m-TOR, akt and COX-2.
• Nutrients that convert hormones that promote cancer to hormones that protect against cancer.
• Angio-preventative nutrients that inhibit angiogenesis.
• Anti-inflammatory nutrients.
• Reversing hyperinsulinemia through nutrition.
• Nutrients that facilitate apoptosis or programmed cell death, a process which cancer cells have lost.
• Detoxifying cancer-causing toxins with nutrients.

Glutathione, glycine, taurine, black raspberry, garlic, omega-3 and -9 fatty acids, fermented soy products, isohumalones from hops, and phytosterols are just a few of the nutrients which data show are essential for the above areas.

Bottom line: Mistletoe has not yet shown a level of efficacy for me to incorporate it in my armamentarium of bioactive nutrients for cancer.

References

1. Ostermann T, Raak C, Bussing A. Survival of cancer patients treated with mistletoe extract (Iscador): a systematic literature review. BMC Cancer. 2009;9(1):451.

2. Ernst E, Schmidt K, Steuer-Vogt MK. Mistletoe for cancer? International Journal of Cancer. 2003;107(2):262-267.

3. Friess H, Beger HG, Kunz J, Funk N, Schilling M, Buchler MW. Treatment of advanced pancreatic cancer with mistletoe: results of a pilot trial. Anticancer research. 1996;16(2):915-920.

4. Schink M, Tröger W, Dabidian A, et al. Mistletoe extract reduces the surgical suppression of natural killer cell activity in cancer patients. a randomized phase III trial. Forschende Komplementärmedizin/Research in Complementary Medicine. 2007;14(1):9-17.

5. ElsÄSser-Beile U, Leiber C, Wetterauer U, et al. Adjuvant Intravesical Treatment with a Standardized Mistletoe Extract to Prevent Recurrence of Superficial Urinary Bladder Cancer. Anticancer research. 2005;25(6C):4733-4736.

6. Kienle GS, Kiene H. Review Article: Influence of Viscum album L (European Mistletoe) Extracts on Quality of Life in Cancer Patients: A Systematic Review of Controlled Clinical Studies. Integrative Cancer Therapies. 2010;9(2):142-157.

7. Edzard E. Mistletoe as a treatment for cancer. BMJ. 2006;333.

Joan Valentine - A Foundation for Natural Cures, Inc. - Provides education and integrative medicine solutions to those suffering from cancer and their families.

By Joel A. Aronowitz, MD
Clinical Professor Plastic Surgery
USC Keck School of Medicine
Cedars Sinai Medical Center
University Stem Cell Center

Our fat tissue contains a lot more than just fat. It’s been known for many years that the fat that makes our jeans tight and skin loose contains large numbers of small cells with the potential to grow into many types of the tissue and play a central role in healing and regeneration. Only recently though have doctors been able to apply these exciting laboratory findings to help patients in clinical practice.

A study underway by doctors at the Breast Preservation Foundation in Los Angeles exemplifies this new trend in clinical use of Adipose Derived Stem Cell. Women in the study are offered use of their own stem cells to regrow their breast marred by prior surgery and even radiation to treat breast cancer.

Treatment of breast cancer usually involves removal of the tumor itself along with all or part of the surrounding normal breast to ensure that a complete removal is accomplished. After the surgery, the breast is frequently treated with radiation which further shrinks the breast and turns the soft breast tissue to a hard, woody texture. For years, the only options available to reconstruct the breast were highly invasive flap procedures such as the lat dorsi or TRAM flaps or an implant. The flaps require a donor site scar and extended healing, and implants are associated with the problems of any large foreign body. They are especially problematic after radiation treatment.

Stem cell treatment has the advantage of producing a natural regrowth of fat tissue within the breast, giving it a soft, natural appearance and feel using the woman’s own fat stored in the abdomen, hips and thighs. The Los Angeles study uses fat harvested with liposuction from the hip, abdomen or thighs. The fat, usually 400 to 600 cc, is treated in a special biologic laboratory right in the operating room to isolate the tiny stem cells from the larger mature adipocyte (fat) cells and other components in the lipoaspirate (obtained during liposuction). The process takes about 1.5 hours while the patient remains in the operating room. The tedious process involves a complex series of washings and high-speed centrifugations but no additional chemicals or growth factors are added to change the biology or genetics of the cells.

Almost a million cells on average are isolated from each 1 cc drop of liposuction fat. The stem cells are then added to additional lipoaspirate to inject into the disfigured breast. The stem-cell-enhanced fat grafts are placed with a blunt hollow needle in small aliquots so no surgical scars are placed on the treated breasts. Postoperative healing is usually limited to swelling and bruising both in the breast and the liposuction harvest area. Patients usually complain of more discomfort in the liposuction areas then the treated breast. Of course, no one complains about the improved contour of the hips and abdomen which comes with the needed liposuction; it’s an added bonus.

Improved breast size is immediate, but the improved skin quality and regeneration or regrowth of fat takes about 3 to 6 months as the larger fat cells that do not survive the transfer process are replaced by new tissue regenerated by the large numbers of tiny stem cells. Improvement in the texture, quality and skin color of the breast damaged by surgery and radiation begins immediately and begins to show clinically in about 2 months.

Women who have a breast damaged by breast cancer treatment, especially lumpectomy and radiation are generally good candidates for this treatment. The study requires a waiting period after cancer treatment, but some doctors feel that soon the treatment will be offered in concert with cancer treatment as there is no evidence that normal fat-derived stem cells interfere with treatment. Women seeking an alternative to breast enlargement with implants will be happy to know that this option is available to them as well. Stem-cell-enhanced fat grafting can produce about 1 to 2 cup sizes of enlargement on average and can be repeated every 3-4 months as long as sufficient donor fat is available.

Suzanne Somers’ alternative battle against breast cancer

Mistletoe Extract as Cancer Therapy

Joan Valentine - A Foundation for Natural Cures, Inc. - Provides education and integrative medicine solutions to those suffering from cancer and their families.