A compound avocatin B existing in avocado is found with the potential for leukemia treatment, and it’s especially useful for the acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The research report has been published in the professional journal Cancer Research.
Acute myeloid Leukemia is a kind of blood cancer, and it starts from bone marrow, in which blood stem cells turn into blood myeloblasts, a kind of abnormal blood cells. In recent years more and more people are diagnosed with this disease. About 20,000 people in USA contract acute myeloid leukemia every year. And more than half of these people will lose their lives after the symptoms of AML begin to appear.
The situation of AML and other types of leukemia treatment is not very positive, which is more serious among the elderly people group, where the survival rate is lower than 10%. And the present treatment for AML are mainly bone marrow transplant and chemotherapy, both will bring much pain to the patients in the process. Thus a more efficient and less painful treatment is needed to improve the survival rate.
The new finding of avocatin B, a natural compound, may bring a brand new treatment for AML, as it can targets and destroy the mutated stem cells in bone marrow. In this way avocatin B will be a much easier treatment for patients to experience for that it won’t kill the irrelevant healthy blood cells, which chemotherapy does.
Avocado extraction is not the first time to be studied for its medical use, as it has been commonly used as ingredients for dishes for centuries and many people like to eat it for weight lose or low cholesterol diet. Researchers just determined the role of avocatin B in the process of AML treatment, thus it will take years for it to be applied in clinic use.
The extraction content of avocatin B varies with the source and time changing, thus it’s difficult to isolate a relatively high pure level of it. Researchers are endeavoring to settle this limitation. Besides there are many other problems are waiting to be addressed for the further studies on this substance.
The finding of avocatin B’s drug effect is one of the results of the nutraceuticals’ medical use researches. More such investigations are ongoing for better treatment of cancers and other serious diseases, which requires highly on the ability of translating lab researching results into clinical drugs. Along with this direction, more effective and tolerable treatment for severe diseases will be available in the near future.