5 ways boron battles cancer cells

It’s easy to understand why boron has so many important functions when you consider it’s essential for plants to grow. That means it’s life-promoting.

My last two posts have covered how you can use boron to boost hormones, better absorb other vital nutrients and greatly improve arthritis issues.

But — can you believe — there are even more reasons that boron is necessary to keep you healthy? And fighting cancer is one of them…

Before I get to that, however, there are some additional points to consider regarding boron in your body that will get you excited about supplementing:

• Fast results: With supplementation, you should reach a steady state of boron after just one week; 90 percent of it gets absorbed and is preferentially taken up in bone 4 times more than blood.
• Thyroid help: Boron helps thyroid function by transporting iodide from your blood to tissues of higher iodide concentration (i.e. thyroid gland); it has regulatory roles in 26 known enzymes mainly involved in energy metabolism
• Hormone help: Boron increases low testosterone levels in men and estrogen levels in menopausal women; it promotes vitamin D activation thus increasing calcium and its deposition into bone and teeth.
• Makes calcium work for you: A boron deficiency raises parathyroid hormone which raises blood calcium by releasing calcium from bones and teeth…leading to arthritis, osteoporosis and tooth decay. Elevated blood calcium leads to calcification of muscles (contractions and stiffness), endocrine glands (pineal gland and the ovaries), and blood vessels (arteriosclerosis) and kidneys (stones). A boron deficiency combined with magnesium deficiency especially damages bones and teeth. Fortunately, boron supplementation reduces daily calcium loss by nearly 50 percent (this loss is mainly from resorbing bone and teeth). Osteoporotic rats given a boron supplement for just 30 days reversed their bone quality to be comparable with healthy controls and with rats supplemented with estradiol.

The anticancer effects of boron

Regions where the soil and water are boron-rich correspond with lower rates of several cancer types: prostate, breast, cervical, and lung (in smoking women).

In fact, boron-containing compounds have shown anti-cancer effects both in test tubes and in animals.  Natural and synthetic compounds containing boron are being used as anticancer agents to interfere with cancer cell reproduction through diverse mechanisms. Boron has been shown to:

• Inhibit enzymes involved in cancer promotion
• Block cancer cell division (through splicing mRNA)
• Blocks cancer cell receptors
• Promotes programmed cancer cell death, or “apoptosis”
• Inhibit cancer-induced new blood vessel growth, or “angiogenesis”

Let me share the effects a boron supplement has on specific cancer types.

Prostate cancer

Boric acid inhibits human prostate cancer cell proliferation in vitro (test tubes).

Moreover, higher dietary boron intake correlates with lower prostate cancer incidence in a dose-response pattern.

In a 2004 human study, researchers reported that the risk of prostate cancer was cut by more than half of men consuming more than just 1.8 mg boron supplement daily (remember my goal is 15 mg daily) compared to those consuming 0.9 mg boron supplement or less daily. This was a small study, however, comparing boron intake of 95 men with prostate cancer cases with 8,720 male controls.

A later study found only a small correlation. However, in Texas, increased groundwater boron concentrations correlated significantly with reduced prostate cancer risk and deaths from prostate cancer.

PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) is a commonly measured serum marker in humans and animals known to promote prostate cancer. In 2004 a study showed that animals that received a boron supplement dropped their PSA levels by an astounding 86 percent and shrunk prostate tumor compared to controls.

Cervical cancer

Cervical cancer is 2-5 times lower in Turkey compared to Europe and North America  and it mostly attributable to its boron-rich soil.

This has been shown to be through boron’s inhibition of Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a known cause for cervical cancer. In that study, 1059 women were evaluated for cervical cancer; 472 women living in the boron-rich regions (mean dietary intake of boron was 8.41 mg/day were compared to 587 women living in the boron-poor (1.26 mg/day) regions in Turkey. None of the women in the boron-rich regions had any cytopathological signs of cervical cancer, while 15 women from the boron-poor areas had clear cytopathological findings.

Lung cancer

In 2008 a study from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX reported that when a boron supplement and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) are combined, there is a highly significant reduction in lung cancer for women.

Those women with low boron intake and who did not use HRT were at substantially increased risk for lung cancer — with 39 percent, 64 percent, and 95 percent increasing risk by decreasing quartile of boron intake.

Boron dose review

Just to summarize my dosing recommendations, you should consider taking a daily dietary boron supplement of ~15 to 20 mg daily, and even up to 50 mg daily if you need to reverse arthritis or osteoporosis in the form of capsules (3 mg or 6 mg) or from your homemade borax solution: 1 tsp borax per 1 liter of water, take 2 tsp (10 ml) of this solution (contains ~ 6 mg of boron) three times daily with food.

To aging slower with ample boron,

Michael Cutler, M.D.