Phthalates. Hard to pronounce let alone spell.
These are ubiquitous. They are found in your fridge, home and office.
They are used in the production of flexible vinyl, like the thin plastic bags in the grocery store, even Whole Foods, and that wood-like looking but not wood floor.
They are used in plastics that package food or in presses that make olive oil.
They are in perfume and nail polish.
Well, cell studies (looking at cells in the lab) show that phthalates are not good for cancer. We had known they promote initiation of cancer. But now these new cells studies out of Taiwan show phthalates, like benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP), cause “chemoresistance” of breast cancer.
In other words, they reduce effectiveness of this type of breast cancer treatment.
Phthalates caused chemoresistance of doxorubicin/cyclophosphamide and to doxorubicin with cyclophosphamide. In addition, BBP increased angiogenesis of breast cancer in a mouse model. This means it helped the breast cancer cells get “fed”.
These results, for the first time, provide evidence that BBP adversely affects efficacy of chemotherapy by remodeling the tumor microenvironment of breast cancer.
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Oncol Rep. 2015 Sep 23. doi: 10.3892/or.2015.4307.