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Natural Chemopreventive Agents for the Treatment and Prevention of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

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Handbook of Oxidative Stress in Cancer: Therapeutic Aspects

Abstract

Oral cancer is a severe health problem claiming around 120,000 deaths annually, of which 90% is oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). Despite the development of various chemical drugs, the overall survival rate remains limited. Further, resistances to the standard chemotherapeutic drugs and targeted therapy amounts to severe challenges in the treatment and prevention of OSCC. Hence, the development of novel anticancer drugs with minimum adverse effects would aid in to circumvent this current scenario. In fact, the interrelation between healthy diet and reduced prevalence of cancer opened up a new arena for researchers to explore phytochemicals to complement current cancer therapies. Surprisingly, these plant-derived natural compounds exert their beneficial effects through the regulation of various molecular pathways, such as cellular proliferation, invasion and metastasis through exerting its antioxidant activity, apoptosis, cell cycle arrest, and inactivation of carcinogen. In this review, we are focusing on various phytochemicals that have shown to have chemopreventive activity against OSCC and their pharmacological activity corresponding to their molecular targets.

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Remadevi, V., Azeez, J.M., Ravindran, V., Sreeja, S., Sujatha, A.S., Ismael, S. (2022). Natural Chemopreventive Agents for the Treatment and Prevention of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma. In: Chakraborti, S. (eds) Handbook of Oxidative Stress in Cancer: Therapeutic Aspects. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5422-0_207

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