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Even after cancer strikes, the vitamin D our bodies make in the summer helps fight the disease. A study at Harvard found that mortality rates were 40 percent higher among lung cancer patients operated on in the winter than among those who had surgery in the summer and had high levels of D from sun or diet. This year, a British study found that survival rates there are highest among cancer patients diagnosed in the summer and fall. And last year in Norway researchers found higher survival rates among young people with Hodgkin's lymphoma diagnosed in the autumn.Benefits aren't limited to D from the sun. In Canada, patients given vitamin D along with chemotherapy had fewer side effects and developed fewer thromboses (blood clots), serious complications of treatment, than those who got a placebo with chemo.
How can a mere vitamin harbor such amazing powers? For starters, D isn't really a vitamin. In the body, it is transformed into a benevolent hormone, shoring up our bones, regulating cell growth and helping prevent the kind of wild cell proliferation that leads to cancer. "Almost every tissue and cell in the body has receptors for vitamin D, which means that every tissue and cell needs vitamin D to function maximally," says Michael F. Holick, MD, a vitamin D researcher at Boston University.
In the lab, researchers have watched as activated vitamin D actually turns off cancer. When prostate cancer cells were exposed to D, the cells stopped reproducing wildly and resumed normal, orderly growth. Later studies showed that the same process occurs in colon and breast cancer cells. And when Dr. Holick's team gave vitamin D to mice with colon cancer, they witnessed a 40 percent reduction in tumor growth.
The big challenge now? Distilling the cancer-protective elements of vitamin D into compounds that can be used to treat humans.
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