Washington: Lung-cancer patients who use nicotine supplements such as a patch or gum to help them quit smoking may undermine their chemotherapy.
Nicotine is not known to cause cancer but it can protect cancer cells from some of the most widely used chemotherapy drugs, researchers reported on Sunday at a cancer meeting.
Srikumar Chellappan of the University of South Florida and colleagues had studied the effects of nicotine on lung cancer cells that were treated with three commonly used drugs in cancer therapy- gemcitabine, cisplatin and taxol.
The laboratory research was focused on human nonsmall cell lung cancer, which accounts for 80 per cent of all lung cancers. In chemotherapy, exposure to the chemicals causes cancer cells to self-destruct in a process called apoptosis.
With the presence of proteins, the cells increased the production of a pair of proteins, XIAP and survivin, which protected the cells from apoptosis.
"Our findings are in agreement with clinical studies showing that patients who continue to smoke have worse survival profiles than those who quit before treatment," the researchers said.
"They also raise the possibility that nicotine supplementation for smoking cessation might reduce the response to chemotherapeutic agents," they added in a report to appear in next week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The findings are also being presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Washington.
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