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Can CBD Help Fight Childhood Cancer?

Neuroblastoma is an aggressive cancer that arises from the nervous system. Because this cancer is most likely caused by an error in the development of the embryo, it is one of the most common cancers in children. It is therefore often referred to as “childhood cancer”. In this blog you can read why research into CBD against childhood cancer could prove crucial in the fight against this terrible disease.

Programmed Cell Death

Strangely enough, it’s kind of normal that cancer starts to develop in a human body. In fact, cancer develops when cells in the DNA get damaged. Because of that damage, the cell doesn’t grow like it should anymore and an overgrowth can develop. The damaged cell can multiply itself like this and can become a tumor. Thankfully, our body has found a way to fight this. We call this ‘apoptosis’ or programmed cell death. The body attacks the damaged cells, stops them from growing and dividing and removes them. If this is done in time, the damaged cell can’t grow into a tumor.

CBD Can Start Apoptosis

Besides a lot of different other tasks, our endocannabinoid system is hard at work to keep our body healthy. It’s closely involved in removing cancer cells. It has long been known that CBD can help to start the removing of the damaged cells. Now scientists have also discovered how CBD does this when it comes to neuroblastoma.

CBD Activates Receptors And Targets Genes

In a publication from January 2019, scientists of the ‘University of South Carolina School of Medicine’ describe their experiments with neuroblastoma cells. Already in 2002, the same laboratorium discovered that cannabinoids can help to fight this horrible disease. Now, again, they write a very technical and medical dissertation, with a firm conclusion: it isn’t just evident that CBD can help to fight cancer, we also know now how this happens. CBD activates certain receptors and targets genes that are responsible for an overgrowth of cells.

Another Call For Clinical Research

This research is very fundamental and technical. They looked at a cellular level which processes are activated by CBD and in what way this helps to fight cancer cells. It’s made really clear that CBD can help to fight the most common type of cancer in infants. We from SupMedi hope that clinical studies will follow quickly to convince the medical world that it’s about time to take CBD seriously as a medicine.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30713602