All patients receiving the test through Hopkins are required to be seen by a genetic counselor. More dinner menus have included broccoli over the past few years, since Paul Talalay reported that the bushy veggie contains a powerful cancer-preventing compound. As his team reports in the September 16 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , the sprouts contain far more of the compound than does broccoli. Just a block away, at Hopkins's Oncology Center, patients receive chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Talalay hopes that daily spoonfuls of broccoli sprouts will decrease the need for such centers.
Clinical trials are now under way to test the sprouts' protective effects.
Talalay's team has already shown that rats fed sprout extract and exposed to a carcinogen get fewer tumors than rats who don't get extract. The team, which includes plant physiologist Jed Fahey and postdoctoral fellow Yuesheng Zhang, may market the sprouts and plan to donate any profits they make to the non-profit Brassica Foundation, which Talalay established to support research in chemoprotection, or decreasing the risk of cancer through diet. If a woman has a two-centimeter tumor in her breast, a disease process has been going on for 10 to 25 years. Researchers should look to prevent earlier stages from leading to malignancy, he says. In 1992, Talalay and fellow researchers reported that a compound called sulforaphane dramatically boosts cancer-preventing enzymes.