strange thing about EGCG and DHT

[CCS]

I googled egcg dht, and found a news article about prostate cancer invitro. DHT increased the cancer to a point, but then higher levels of DHT actually decreased the cancer. Super high levels reduced it more than the control.

EGCG decreased the cancer, even in the presence of DHT.

But the two of them together sinergistically decreased the cancer. They concluded the egcg sensitized the cancer to the dht, so that it was reduced in the presence of dht even after egcg was no longer used.

Previously, I thought egcg was an androgen receptor blocker. Now I think it works by some other method. The hampster flank organ study just used one dose of dht and found that egcg inhibited growth even in the presence of dht. Looks like they may not have got the whole picture. But cancer and sebum glands are two different things.

 

[JLL]

Yes, I remember that prostate cancer study. In fact, I wrote a blog post on it about a year ago:

Green Tea Catechin Reverses the Effect of DHT in Prostate Cancer Cells

When DHT was added to the androgen-sensitive cells, the growth of cancer cells increased dose-dependently at first. However, after the amount of DHT passed a certain point, the proliferation began to decrease. At the second largest dose, proliferation had decreased below the control cells, and at the largest dose it was almost completely stopped.

When both DHT and ECGC were used on androgen-sensitive cells, cancer cell growth was reduced more than when using only DHT or ECGC. This means DHT and ECGC somehow work together to produce an anti-cancer effect.

As for how green tea grows hair, perhaps there is some 5-alpha-reductase inhibition going on, plus some other things:

In cultured hair follicles, the application of a 95% green tea extract more than doubled the length of hair follicles. Hair growth almost tripled. In the cultured skin cells, the extract increased the growth of new cells in a dose-dependent manner.

The authors report that EGCG affects the expressions of Erk, Akt, Bcl-2 and Bax, and suggest that this effect may be the reason behind the results seen in follicle and skin cell cultures.

As I recall, retinoids also increase the expression of Erk and Akt and have hair growth promoting properties.