BIOACTIVE COMPOUNDS AND ANTI-CANCER ACTION: NARRATIVE REVIEW

Abstract

Cancer is a malignant disease caused by the disordered proliferation of cells, the different sites where this proliferation occurs characterize the variation of the tumor. Current cancer treatments include surgical intervention, radiation, and the use of chemotherapy drugs, which often kill healthy cells and result in toxicity in patients. For this reason, researchers have been bringing herbal medicines as allies to conventional treatment, in carrying out tests with vegetables from Brazil to prove their therapeutic efficacy. In this review, the latest findings in this regard have been gathered and the most recent research on the use of herbal medicines to aid in the treatment of cancer is briefly discussed. The review brought together articles, from the electronic database National Library of Medicine - PUBMED, in depth regarding the mechanisms of action of these herbal medicines and how they act on cancer cells, using the descriptors in English: “fruits”, “cancer”, “Therapeutics ”, “Antineoplastic Agents”, “beverages”, “tea”, “Phytochemicals”, and in Portuguese: “functional drinks”, “cancer”, “fruits” and “metastasis”, 1,583 articles were selected and underwent a qualitative analysis and 20 articles that met the objective of this review were filtered. According to the research carried out, it was possible to conclude that the use of bioactive compounds extracted from various plants of the Brazilian flora, has beneficial potential in combating CA, among the classes of the most studied phytochemicals and with proof of their effectiveness in several cancer lineages. There are flavonoids (bioavailable in citrus fruits) and polyphenols (present in vegetables such as beets, potatoes and apples), the types of cancer that had the most published studies, they were those of the breast and the gastrointestinal tract .