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 Post subject: arsenic & leukemia
PostPosted: Mon Dec 16, 2019 8:19 pm 
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Joined: Wed May 27, 2015 10:20 am
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David Chan, MD from UCLA, Stanford Oncology Fellowship:

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Arsenic is a naturally occuring compound found in minerals and is commonly used to strengthen metals. It's also poisonous. For centuries arsenic has been used to try to murder people including suspicion that Napoleon may have been poisoned with arsenic tainted wine. But it's also been used for several thousand years as a natural remedy.

In 1878 it was reported to lower white blood counts in 2 patients with leukemia. The use of arsenic to treat blood disorders faded until several decades ago when the Chinese reported that arsenic could effectively treat a subtype of acute leukemia, APL or acute promyelocytic anemia.

I was at a national meeting when a Chinese researcher presented a report on arsenic and APL and he prefaced his data in halting English by saying "we have studied this compound for over 2000 years" creating quite a laugh due to the slight mistranslation which would have made it the longest clinical trial ever.

"The activity of arsenic trioxide in patients with APL is an important observation, inasmuch as approximately 20% to 30% of patients with this form of acute myelogenous leukemia relapse despite treatment with all-trans retinoic acid and combination chemotherapy. In one report from China, arsenic trioxide monotherapy produced complete clinical responses in 9 of 10 patients with relapsed APL."

Introduction: The History of Arsenic Trioxide in Cancer Therapy

"Patients with APL can achieve remission with standard treatment (chemotherapy plus ATRA, an oral vitamin A-based compound), but it often comes back," said Bayard L. Powell, M.D., a professor of hematology and oncology at Wake Forest Baptist, principal investigator and lead author on the study. "Arsenic trioxide is then used to get them back into remission, often followed by a bone marrow transplant to try to cure the patient. For this study, we used arsenic as an early "consolidation therapy" after the initial standard treatment to essentially, as one of our first patients described, 'seal the deal' the first time around. Not only did the leukemia rarely return in the patients who received the arsenic, those patients also lived longer."

Study finds arsenic improves survival rate in APL patients

Now it's been reported that a non-chemotherapy treatment regimen of arsenic (Trisenox) and a vitamin A derivative (ATRA) are superior to chemotherapy in treating APL.

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