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en
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Ovarian cancer is the most leading cause of death from
gynecological cancer in the Western world [1-3].
This may be due to the absence of early symptoms which causes the disease. In approximately two-thirds of patients the disease spreads beyond the ovaries [4] resulting in poor prognosis of ovarian cancer stems mainly
from the high percentage of cases diagnosed at an advanced stage.
Although most patients with advanced ovarian cancer respond to
first-line chemotherapy, 80% of the patients ultimately succumb to death
due to recurrence [5]. New strategies to improve clinical response and to reduce toxicity of cancer therapy focus nowadays on chemoprevention, which hopes to identify substances that can suppress cancer transformation [6].
According to the current state of knowledge chemoprevention includes
using agents that affect cell-cycle progression and apoptosis, signal
transduction, oncogene activation, polyamine metabolism, angiogenesis, gap junctional intercellular communication, and more [6,7]. According to guidelines for cancer prevention published by the American Cancer Society Guidelines, one of the key lifestyle factors thought to modify cancer risk is a diet, especially that rich in plant-origin compounds [8-11]. Although nowadays natural therapies are being more and more often considered by physicians to be used even in cancer patients, together with targeted therapies, still little is known about their interaction with conventional chemotherapeutic agents. Numerous studies indicate that chemopreventive phytochemicals with phenolic structure, for example flavonoids or curcuminoids, possessing antiproliferative and antioxidant properties that can overcome
problems of drug resistance and nonspecific toxicity towards normal cells, by reducing the side-effects that are associated with chemotherapy [10,12,13]. Flavonoids with several functions in pathological processes of
cancer are polyphenolic compounds with a basic benzo-γ-pyrone
structure being widely distributed in all foods of plant origin such as fruit, vegetable, tea and wine [9,14,15]. Some studies indicate that the observed pharmacological activities of flavonoids on ovarian cancer may depend on their structure [9,12]. Based on the range and structural complexity,
flavonoids can be categorized into six major subclasses: flavones,
isoflavones, flavonols, flavanones, anthocyanidins and flavan-3-ols [11,16], among which flavones, isoflavones and flavonols are reported in the highest amounts of consumption in the human diet and have biological activity in ovarian cancer [8,9,17,18].
