Vitamin D Shows Promise As Cancer Prevention Drug Mothers urge vitamin D on their children to build strong bones and teeth. However within a decade, a chemically modified version of the vitamin could become one of a small but growing number of drugs used to prevent cancer, researchers reported Aug. 26 at the 220th national meeting of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. Vitamin D is often added to milk and produced naturally by skin exposed to sunlight. But taken in the amounts needed to realize its cancer prevention potential, vitamin D can be too much of a good thing.
Prolonged use can lead to osteoporosis or even death.
Now a research team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., with funding from the National Institutes of Health, says that it may have found a way around the problem. Then they compared how the two groups fared. After a 20-week treatment period, the most promising vitamin D candidate reduced the incidence of tumors by 28 percent and the number of tumors by 63 percent. The results demonstrate the drug's potential effectiveness in preventing cancer, according to the researchers. Previous studies in mice have shown that the drug is safe when ingested, they say.