ABSTRACT
Despite signicant efforts made in the eld of cancer research, cancer is still the second most common cause of death in the United States, exceeded only by heart disease, with an estimated 1,638,910 new cases and 577,190 deaths in 2012 (Siegel et al. 2012). In the world, the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) World Cancer Report, the most comprehensive global examination of cancer, estimated that cancer incidence could increase by 50% to 15 million new cases in 2020, suggesting the epidemic nature of cancer in the world. So far, there is no effective treatment for a complete cure of cancer; therefore, cancer prevention has become an important strategy to ght against cancers. It is generally accepted that one-third of cancers could be prevented by maintaining healthy lifestyles and diets. In addition, it is known that inammation and oxidative stress are important biological mechanisms by which carcinogenesis occurs. Therefore, antioxidant and antiinammatory effects of novel agents are important for preventing, suppressing, or reversing the development of carcinogenesis. Importantly, many natural agents from plant-based diet have shown their anti-inammation and anticarcinogen activities without systemic toxicity. Therefore, these natural agents have recently received much attention in the elds of cancer chemoprevention and chemotherapy. The in vitro and in vivo studies have demonstrated that natural agents could inhibit the development of cancer from premalignant lesions by the suppression of inammation and carcinogenesis. Moreover, these chemopreventive agents also exert anticancer effects by inhibiting cancer cell growth, invasion, and metastasis. Because of their antitumor effect and nontoxic feature, these natural agents have been used in combination treatment with conventional chemotherapeutics or radiotherapy (Banerjee et al. 2005; Bava et al. 2005; Chan et al. 2003; Li et al. 2005, 2006) for better treatment outcome. Recently, more clinical trials using natural agents in combination with conventional cancer therapy are being conducted to evaluate these novel therapeutic strategies in the
20.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 387 20.2 Inammation and Cancer ..................................................................................................... 388 20.3 Anti-Inammatory Effects of Isoavone .............................................................................. 389 20.4 Anticancer Effects of Isoavone ...........................................................................................390
