Chemotherapy Supplements: Co-Q 10?
Chemotherapy is notoriously rough on the body, so I’d thought I’d share a little info on chemotherapy supplements, Co Q 10 in particular, that may help take a little of the edge off. Now, I’m not an oncologist, so don’t go ignoring your doctor’s advice or anything crazy like that. In fact, quite the opposite… always make sure you keep your physician informed of any supplements you are taking or intend to start taking.
Chemotherapy Supplements: Help or Harm?
The first concern, of course, is to make sure CoQ10 isn’t going to cause some sort of problem by interfering with any of the chemotherapy medications. The good news is, the evidence for any negative interaction is extremely weak. There’s only one negative study, as compared to many positive studies, and when you take a closer look at it, this one negative study isn’t a large concern. Let me explain why.
The study in question (1) concerned the effects of large doses of CoQ10 on the effects of radiation therapy. Radiation, not chemo. The study was done on mice and involved extraordinarily high levels of Co Q10… 40 mg/kg was the dosage needed to see significant reductions in how effective the radiation was. Doses as high as 10mg/kg seemed to have no effect.
To put that into perspective, even if I took around 700 mg of CoQ10, I would still be in the “safe”, non- interfering range. Considering the most I’ve ever seen recommended is in the 300-400 mg range, it’s extremely unlikely you’d ever get to that “interfering” level… and again, that’s for radiation, not chemo.
CoQ10 and Chemotherapy: The Benefits
Okay, now that safety concerns are pretty much settled, let’s ask if this stuff actually does us any good. There’s a number of studies out there on this, and I’m going to divide them into two camps: increasing the effectiveness of the chemo, and protecting the body from the detrimental effects of chemotherapy.
A couple of different researchers have found a benefit to adding CoQ10 supplementation to chemotherapy medications, specifically to the use of tamoxifen. This was found to be true in a general sense for rats (2) but some more specific clinical markers of increased chemotherapy effectiveness were found by another team of researchers.
In those studies, researchers found that breast cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy who were also supplementing with a mix of CoQ10, riboflavin, and niacin (they called it CoRN, which I found mildly amusing), gained two interesting benefits. First off, they had a decrease in markers of tumor angiogenesis, or new blood vessel formation.
This is a big deal because tumors require a serious blood supply to multiply, grow, and cause all the problems they like to cause. Choke off the blood supply, and you starve the tumor. This study found that the supplementation of 100 mg CoQ10, 10 mg riboflavin and 50 mg niacin reduced the indicators of new blood vessel formation (3).
Second, the same group of folks discovered their nifty CoRN mix (I can’t help reaching for puns here) also helps prevent recurrence of cancer. They found that tamoxifen helped prevent recurrence by itself (using blood markers commonly used to gauge an upcoming recurrence), but that adding their CoQ10 supplement mix reduced those blood markers of recurrence even more (4).
So to sum up, these supplements seem to enchance the effects of chemotherapy in a couple of ways. But what about the toxic effects of chemo? Can we do anything about that?
Helping Chemo Symptoms With CoQ10
One of the major side effects of chemo is cardiotoxicity, which is fancy talk for damage to the heart. It seems the mechanism of this damage is the destruction of the heart’s mitochondria, which are the energy generators for the individual cells. Obviously, if the generators powering your heart cells start to die off, your ticker isn’t going to do so well.
Why heart cells? There’s a particular, unique enzyme in the heart mitochondria that react with the anthracylcine family of chemo drugs to produce a ton of free radicals (more on the subject of free radicals and antioxidants here) and the end result is damage to the mitochondrial DNA. The short version is, chemo turns into battery acid in your heart (metaphorically speaking).
That’s the bad news. The good news is, CoQ10 seems to have a pretty decent protective effect in this area (5). That shouldn’t be too surprising… CoQ10 does all of its best work in the area of the mitochondria, including as an antioxidant (anti- free radical), so I actually would’ve been surprised to NOT see a beneficial effect in this area.
There’s more. Some of the same researchers working with that CoRN supplement (jeesh, I REALLY want to make a corn-related pun here, but I’ve got nothing!) found some additional beneficial effects of CoQ10 supplementation. The study that really caught my eye was on the increase in DNA repair enzymes associated with taking CoQ10 (6), again studying breast cancer patients taking tamoxifen.
Additionally, there were two more studies showing improvement in a number of blood chemistry markers (7) and for a reduction in hyperlipidemia in particular (8). Tamoxifen induces an increases in blood lipid profiles (think cholesterol), and CoQ10 appears to reduce that effect and return blood chemistry back to more-normal levels.
All in all, CoQ10 (along with riboflavin and niacin, particularly) has been shown in a number of recent studies to be a safe and beneficial adjunctive therapy for those undergoing the rigors of chemotherapy. As I mentioned earlier, though, don’t just go gobbling the stuff down on your own. Be sure to consult with your physician. All of the references cited in this article are cited in a format so that your doctor can easily look them up on PubMed or other resources, so feel free to copy, paste, and email them for your doctor’s review.
Stay healthy!
References:
1. Lund EL, Quistorff B, Spang-Thomsen M, Kristjansen PE. Folia Microbiol (Praha). 1998;43(5):505-6
2. Perumal SS, Shanthi P, Sachdanandam P Chem Biol Interact. 2005 Feb 28;152(1):49-58.
3. Anti-angiogenic potential of CoenzymeQ10, riboflavin and niacin in breast cancer patients undergoing tamoxifen therapy. Premkumar VG, Yuvaraj S, Sathish S, Shanthi P, Sachdanandam P. Vascul Pharmacol. 2008 Apr-Jun;48(4-6):191-201. Epub 2008 Mar 5
4. Effect of coenzyme Q10, riboflavin and niacin on serum CEA and CA 15-3 levels in breast cancer patients undergoing tamoxifen therapy. Premkumar VG, Yuvaraj S, Vijayasarathy K, Gangadaran SG, Sachdanandam P. Biol Pharm Bull. 2007 Feb;30(2):367-70
5. Coenzyme q10 for prevention of anthracycline-induced cardiotoxicity. Conklin KA. Integr Cancer Ther. 2005 Jun;4(2):110-30. Review
6. Co-enzyme Q10, riboflavin and niacin supplementation on alteration of DNA repair enzyme and DNA methylation in breast cancer patients undergoing tamoxifen therapy. Premkumar VG, Yuvaraj S, Shanthi P, Sachdanandam P. Br J Nutr. 2008 Dec;100(6):1179-82
7. Effect of Coenzyme Q(10), Riboflavin and Niacin on Tamoxifen treated postmenopausal breast cancer women with special reference to blood chemistry profiles. Yuvaraj S, Premkumar VG, Shanthi P, Vijayasarathy K, Gangadaran SG, Sachdanandam P. Breast Cancer Res Treat. 2009 Mar;114(2):377-84. Epub 2008 Apr 22
8. Ameliorating effect of coenzyme Q10, riboflavin and niacin in tamoxifen-treated postmenopausal breast cancer patients with special reference to lipids and lipoproteins. Yuvaraj S, Premkumar VG, Vijayasarathy K, Gangadaran SG, Sachdanandam P.Clin Biochem. 2007 Jun;40(9-10):623-8. Epub 2007 Mar 19