2 DIETARY PHYTOCHEMICALS IN CHEMOPREVENTION OF HEAD AND NECK CANCER
Plant based natural products have been utilized in traditional medicine systems for thousands of years (The Unani, Indian Ayurvedic &The Chinese) and have provided many leads for modern medicine. These bioactive components are non-toxic at practical doses & can offer encouraging alternative for the development of adjuvants for conventional therapies as well as newer nonconventional approaches.
Data/information for the present review was collected from Google Scholar and PubMed search engines using the Keywords: Phytochemicals, head and neck cancer, adjuvant therapy, chemo-radiotherapy, Nano formulation. Other relevant research articles were also searched manually and approximately 350 review and original articles published between 2000-2021 involving in vitro, in vivo, preclinical as well as clinical studies were screened. After screening of abstracts duplicates were removed.
Our detailed literature survey revealed that effect of approximately 40 phytochemicals have been studied on HNC so far. Majority of these belong to the group polyphenols followed by organosulphur compounds and terpenoids. Most of these phytochemicals show their effects bothin-vitro as well as in-vivo . The various phytochemicals studied and their molecular mechanisms are summarized in Table 1.