Graduate Student University of Illinois Springfield Springfield, Illinois, United States
Disclosure(s):
Janice Akpobaro, Master's of Public Health Candidate: No relevant financial relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.
Objectives: This study aims to encourage traditional use of food as medicine and stimulate additional research on soursop leaves for melanoma treatment and prevention.
Methods: This study systematically reviewed 23 articles on the traditional use of soursop (A. muricata) leaf tea for food as medicine in melanoma disease prevention and treatment.
Results: Soursop One of the acetogenins, cis-annonacin, which was isolated from soursop seeds, demonstrated extremely strong cytotoxicity toward colon adenocarcinoma cells, with a potency that was 10,000 times greater than that of the cancer treatment drug Adriamycin (Padmanabhan & Paliyath, 2016). In a case study involving a 66-year-old lady, consumption of boiled water infusion of soursop leaves caused her metastatic breast cancer to stabilize for 5 years (Hansra et al., 2014).
Mutakin et al. (2022) study reported that “an LD50 of >211 mg/kg for A. muricata leaf aqueous extract which is higher than the recommended daily consumption limit for humans”. However, further studies on annonacin's neurotoxicity showed that excessive consumption results in neurodegenerative disorders (Abdul Wahab et al., 2018).
Melanoma In the United States, melanoma cases were anticipated to reach 186,680 in 2023. 89,070 cases will occur in situ (noninvasive), bound to the epidermis (the top layer of skin), while 97,610 cases will be invasive, penetrating the epidermis into the dermis (the skin’s second layer). At the time of this study, an estimated 97,610 new cases of melanoma skin cancer, both sexes combined, had been diagnosed (American Cancer Society, 2023). Men will account for 58,120 of the invasive cases, while women will account for 39,490 of them (The Skin Cancer Foundation, 2018). 2,570 women and 5,420 men, respectively, would die from melanoma of the skin in the United States in 2023 (Statista, 2023).
Conclusions: A.muricata extract can serve as a preventative and treatment medicine in melanoma cases since traditional medicine has long employed its leaves to cure cancer. In the 21st century and beyond, A. muricata extracts appear to be some of the most potent and promising medicinal substances that require further study (Gavamukulya et al., 2017) in melanoma prevention and treatment.
Funding Sources: This research was funded by the author during her Master's of Public Health program at the University of Illinois, Springfield.
