Pancreatic cancer: can old research provide new breakthroughs?

• Author: Beljanski, Sylvie
• Position: Medicine & Health

There is a rising interest in exploring new avenues of savings concerning health care--one of which is integrative medicine. "Are Complementary Therapies and Integrative Care Cost-Effective?--A Systematic Review of Economic Evaluations" published in BMJ Open (formerly the British Medical Journal), an overview of cost-effectiveness studies on complementary and integrative medicine (CIM) found 28 "high-quality studies," according to lead author Patricia Herman. This study was global in scope and covered the years 2000-10.

Herman, an economist and licensed naturopathic physician, first began the project in 2008 with David Eisenberg of the Harvard University School of Public Health. "I'm tired of this talk that there is no evidence for cost-effectiveness of complementary and integrative medicine," Herman told the Huffington Post. "There is evidence. We need to move onto phase two and look at how transferable these findings are. We can take this evidence and run."

Seeing the growing interest of the American people for CIM may make politicians more willing to run with it. The World Health Organization estimates that 80% of the world's population, or about 4,000,000,000 people, employ herbal medicine for some part of their health care. Thirty percent of the U.S. population uses herbal remedies each year. In the past 10 years, the use of high-dose vitamins has grown more than 130%, and the use of herbal supplements, over 380%. As interest rises, money follows, and policies change.

No wonder that there is a growing sense of urgency around research conducted by Kansas University Medical Center, which not only confirmed the anti-cancer effect on ovarian and pancreatic cancer cells of two plant extracts (Pao pereira and Rauwolfia vomitoria)--first studied by Mirko Beljanski--but found that the botanicals worked especially well when combined with traditional chemotherapy treatment. (Full disclosure: the Beljanski Foundation funded the KUMC study.)

The results demonstrate how the two extracts inhibit the development of pancreatic cancer (PC) cells, a notoriously difficult to treat cancer for two main reasons: late diagnosis and resistance to chemotherapy. The pancreas is located deep within the body, so early tumors cannot be seen or felt by health care providers during routine physical exams. Patients usually have no symptoms until the cancer has spread to other organs. At present, there are no blood tests to find cancer of the pancreas early. Because...