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.