Saffron fights
liver cancer
Yellow spice inhibits key
cell-proliferation proteins
By Nathan Seppa
Best known as a food seasoning and dye,
saffron can also stifle liver cancer in rats,
tests show. In a paper in the September
Hepatology, researchers report that the
spice suppresses a slew of known cancer-related compounds and boosts several
beneficial ones.
Saffron is an expensive spice made
from the Crocus sativus flower. Past
studies have hinted that it has benefits against depression, inflammation,
memory loss and as an antioxidant.
Studies in animals and in human cells
have even suggested that saffron can
inhibit certain cancers. “But the exact
mechanism of the anticancer effect
of saffron is unclear,” says Amr Amin,
a molecular biologist at United Arab
Emirates University in Al-Ain.
Harvested from the Crocus sativus flower (shown), saffron stifles liver cancer’s
growth in rats and even inhibits the proliferation of human liver cancer cells.
Brain stents don’t decrease strokes
Rates of death, repeat events higher after implant procedure
By Nathan Seppa
Threading a catheter up into the brain
and inserting a device that widens a
dangerously narrowed artery might do
more harm than good in some patients
at risk of stroke. An aggressive course of
medications alone appears to be safer,
researchers report in the Sept. 15 New
England Journal of Medicine.
Mesh cylinders called stents have
offered cardiologists an approach to
opening clogged coronary arteries
that is less invasive than surgery. Now
researchers are using a new generation of tiny stents to tackle similarly
narrowed vessels in the brain. Federal
regulators approved a brain stent in
2005, and past studies have supported
stents’ effectiveness against stroke.
Researchers used the approved stent
in the new trial. The team enrolled
hundreds of patients at 50 hospitals
who had just survived a stroke or had a
transient ischemic attack, a kind of
stroke that clears up within a day, says
study coauthor Marc Chimowitz, a neu-
rologist at the Medical University of
South Carolina in Charleston. The aver-
age age of the patients was about 60.
Nearly 15 percent of patients getting
a stent died or experienced a stroke
within 30 days of joining the study. All
those strokes occurred within a week of
stent placement — often on the first day.
Of the patients getting medication only,
less than 6 percent died or had a stroke
within the first 30 days. After one year,
about 20 percent of the stent group and
12 percent of the drugs-only group had
died or had a stroke. The stented vessels
hemorrhaged in some cases.
Translating the success seen in coro-
nary arteries to fragile brain vessels has
been tricky. “It’s very attractive to think
that if you can make the vessel picture
look better, the patient will do better,”
says Walter Koroshetz, deputy director
of the National Institute of Neurological
Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Md.
“But it really has to be proven.”
Several companies make stents, and
ongoing studies may show whether the
devices can prevent strokes in some
people. “I don’t think the [stent] inter-
vention approach is dead,” Koroshetz
says, but brain surgeons will need better
stents that don’t damage vessels. s
