This means cancer cells can survive with or without oxygen - so flooding them with oxygen won’t stop their growth. For example, researchers now know that cancer cells don’t survive any better in an environment without oxygen.Ĭancer cells grow without oxygen because they spread so quickly that blood vessels can’t deliver oxygen to them fast enough. While some of the early studies on hydrogen peroxide and cancer seemed promising, more recent research reveals major problems. However, most found that injecting hydrogen peroxide into cancerous tumors was ineffective.Ī 1981 animal study found that delivering hydrogen peroxide directly to tumors through microscopic beads avoided the side effects found in other studies and did seem to have some anticancer effects. Other animal studies were done over the next few decades. Between 50 and 60 percent of the rats were tumor-free within 60 days. In one very early study in 1957, rats with cancerous tumors drank a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and water. Studies looking at the link between cancer cells and oxygen started in the 1950s. This led to a belief that oxygenating compounds, including hydrogen peroxide, could kill cancer cells by flooding them with more oxygen than they could handle.īased on this research, some people claim that drinking or injecting a solution containing a 35 percent concentration of hydrogen peroxide cures cancer. Some developed a hypothesis that low oxygen levels may actually cause cancer. Researchers spent the next several decades trying to figure out why cancer cells survive without oxygen. This phenomenon is called the Warburg effect. While normal cells sometimes use only glycolysis too, this occurs only when there isn’t enough oxygen.Ĭancer cells, on the other hand, use only glycolysis even when oxygen is present. In 1931, Otto Heinrich Warburg won a Nobel Prize for discovering that cancer cells use only glycolysis to produce energy.

To produce energy, normal cells typically go through a process that starts with glycolysis (the breaking down of glucose, or sugar) and ends with oxidative phosphorylation. What’s the link between cancer and oxygen?

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