Vitamin D Holds Promise to Prevent (Many) Cancers

Colon. Ovarian. Endometrial. Prostate. Breast. What do these have in common? They are at risk to cancer, and vitamin D levels impact their risks differently.

Vancouver Disc Centers offers nutritional tips to our Vancouver chiropractic care patients in hopes to keeping them healthy. In December 2016 alone, many articles in a variety of peer-reviewed and well-respected journals were published regarding cancer prevention and vitamin D. Vancouver Disc Centers finds this interesting and worthy of more consideration.

One article points to the likely reason for all this attention on vitamin D: Being deficient in vitamin D is related to increased risk of cancer, autoimmune disease, inflammation, infection, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disease and bone and mineral disorders. (Wow! Vancouver Disc Centers sees those as reasons enough to evaluate your vitamin D levels!)  The vitamin D receptor keeps the intestinal system in balance and protects against inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer. (1) Vitamin D is a wonder our Vancouver chiropractic patients need to check out!

More specifically, vitamin D appears to reduce the risk of cancer. In the world of breast cancer, triple-negative breast cancer is one of the least responsive to treatment types with a high rate of relapse. Early prevention of this cancer is important, and vitamin D compounds are reported to be potential preventive agents to inhibit this form of breast cancer by regulating the cancer stem cells and differentiation. (2) However an adequate vitamin D level, as good as it is in preventing cancers and hypertension and osteoporosis for women, doesn’t appear to be as effective for ovarian and endometrial cancers. (3) Vancouver Disc Centers encourages our Vancouver female patients to study their overall lifestyle approach which can include vitamin D supplementation to keep their cancer risk as low as possible.

Vancouver Disc Centers views keeping the cancer risk low overall and the risk of more aggressive forms down as quite important when caring for our Vancouver chiropractic patients' overall health.  That’s where vitamin D comes in again. Vitamin D appears to be preventive of more advanced or aggressive forms of cancer. Vitamin D3 supplementation taken in hopes of preventing advanced colorectal adenomas varies by vitamin D receptor genotype in one study. Risk was reduced by 64% in AA genotype persons (26% of study participants) and by 41% in persons with 1 or 2 G alleles (74% of study participants). The effect of Vitamin D3 supplementation on overall adenoma risk is not presented in this study. (4)  (Vancouver Disc Centers knows these terms aren’t normal Vancouver chiropractic terms.)  Further, aggressive prostate cancer risk is high in African American men. Researchers suggest that may be due to low levels of serum vitamin D as their study found that vitamin D deficiency significantly increased the risk of aggressive prostate cancer disease. They also suggest future study of genetics to figure out this puzzling statistic. (5) Vancouver Disc Centers notices that every research finding leads to another question to keep the scientists busy and our Vancouver chiropractic patients turning to Vancouver Disc Centers for the latest news!

Contact Vancouver Disc Centers today to get more information about vitamin D, check your levels and investigate your options to increase your vitamin D levels and make them as cancer preventive as possible.