Vitamin B6 cuts colon cancer risk

[Naveed Yaseen]

High daily levels of vitamin B6 may reduce the risk of getting colon cancer by 58 percent, claims a new study from Harvard Medical School.

The research, published in the May 4 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, builds on other studies that have already indicated a strong preventive effect from the vitamin.

“There are several smaller studies that have found a protective effect from dietary intakes of B6,” said lead researcher Esther K. Wei, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. However, “this is the first large study of women to look at blood levels of B6” and find a protective effect, she added.

Wei and her colleagues evaluated nearly 33,000 women who were participants in the Nurses’ Health study, a long-running study that began in 1976. Since then, researchers have focused on subsets of the original 121,700 participants, all nurses between 30 and 55 years of age when they enrolled, to study various health issues.

Among this subset, Wei and her team analyzed blood samples collected in 1989, looking for levels of a substance called PLP (pyridoxal 5’-phosphate) — the main active form of vitamin B6 in the blood. Then they looked at medical records to determine who contracted cancer of the colon or cancer of the colon and rectum (colorectal).

They found a total of 194 colorectal cancer cases and 410 cases of colon polyps, which often precede colorectal cancer. After dividing the women into four groups, from lowest to highest blood levels of PLP, the researchers found that the highest quartile group had a 44 percent lower risk of colorectal cancer and a 58 percent lower risk of colon cancer. The same associations held for the development of polyps.

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