It's what the doctor orders

Saturday, April 28, 2012

DR David Agus doesn’t sit while talking to me on the phone from his California-based office. “I’m walking around with headphones as we talk,” says Agus, professor of medicine at the University of Southern California (USC) Keck School of Medicine and author of a new book, The End of Illness.

“I make my day a movement day. I have meetings while I walk. I exercise. I do yoga every morning,” he says. He also takes a daily aspirin and statin (cholesterol-lowering drug) and he eats his meals, and goes to bed, at regular times.

For Agus, these daily habits are part of his arsenal against getting cancer and other diseases.

As head of USC’s Westside Cancer Center, founder of oncology.com — the largest online cancer resource — and winner of the 2009 GQ Magazine Rockstar of Science Award, Agus has serious credentials. Yet much of his cancer-prevention advice is extraordinarily unconventional.

Aside from advising people to ditch multivitamins — they might significantly increase your risk for disease — Agus says being sedentary for most of the day could be as bad or worse than smoking, and that battling flu symptoms could greatly increase your chances of suffering a fatal heart attack 10 years from now.

One of America’s most respected oncologists, Agus has been at the coalface of patient treatment and cancer research for 20 years and backs up his unorthodox beliefs — which he says are unsettling to many — with scientific evidence. “What I say about vitamins really causes offence. People have had this crutch for five or 25 years and I take that crutch away, saying it has no benefit and potentially could cause harm.”

Citing more than a dozen pro-vitamin D headlines that credit the sunshine vitamin with benefits ranging from preventing breast cancer to lowering mortality in leukaemia patients, Agus says numerous studies have shown no benefit from vitamin D in cancer patients. One study came to a “screeching end” in 2007 when more deaths were recorded among advanced prostate cancer patients, who’d been given high doses of a powerful form of vitamin D, than among those given a placebo. “The human body’s a complex system,” says Agus, adding that everything we take — including multivitamins for perceived lacks in the body — “doesn’t just change a deficiency. It affects the whole system”.

Agus bolsters his claim that “vitamins don’t live up to the hype” with accounts of two recent studies. In 2010, the US-based Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality published a review of 63 randomised, controlled trials on multivitamins, which found they did nothing to prevent cancer or heart disease in most populations.

“The only exception occurred in developing countries where nutritional deficiencies are widespread,” he says. In 2009, researchers at a cancer research centre in Seattle — after following 160,000 post-menopausal women for about a decade — concluded multivitamins failed to prevent cancer, heart disease and all causes of death for the women tracked.

Agus pulls no punches when it comes to the flu vaccine. Get it, he urges. “If you skip your flu shot, you’ll survive the flu. You’ll get it for several days, but those days of inflammation a decade from now can increase your risk of heart disease and cancer by 10%.” Inflammation is part of our body’s natural defence mechanism against bad bacteria, viruses and toxins, but Agus warns that — let run rampant — it can disrupt the immune system, leading to chronic problems and disease. He recalls people, diagnosed with cancer in particular parts of their body, who can link that same area to a previous trauma or injury.

The flu, he says, comes with “staggering amounts” of inflammation, resulting in the release of a flurry of cytokines — chemicals that age blood vessels. “A mere two weeks of an inflammatory storm — such as recovering from a bad seasonal cold or flu — can harm us in ways that increase our lifetime risk of obesity, heart attack, stroke and cancer.”

Agus also has unsettling news for anyone who goes to the gym every morning and exercises vigorously for an hour, then spends the next seven hours sitting at a desk before driving home and watching TV for the evening — that bout of exercise isn’t going to do much good if you’re sedentary for the rest of the day. A 2010 study by the American Cancer Society found “sitting for extended periods poses a health risk as insidious as smoking or overexposure to sun”.

Another study from Melbourne’s International Diabetes Institute showed even two hours of daily exercise wouldn’t compensate for “spending 22 hours sitting on your rear end”.

Agus encourages the over-40s to talk to their doctor about taking a daily aspirin and statin — statins lower inflammation as well as cholesterol, while aspirin doesn’t just stave off blood clots, heart attacks and stroke. It has also been shown to prevent deaths from cancer. He cites British research that included eight long-term studies and 25,000 patients, which found a 75mgm daily dose of aspirin, taken for at least five years, cuts risk of dying from common cancers by roughly 10 to 60%. “I’m not telling everybody to take these drugs — if you’ve got a history of gastric ulcers, aspirin’s not good for you. All I want is for the conversations to happen between patients and doctors.”

lThe author’s online health questionnaire is at www.TheEndofIllness.com. He advises completing it and discussing your responses with your GP.

*The End Of Illness, by Dr David Agus, €18.36.

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