The use of vitamins, especially antioxidants, by cancer patients has increased significantly in recent years. Though these are micronutrients and theoretically should be beneficial to health, most of the time the supplements are synthetic and used as a single agent. There is concern that antioxidants use during chemotherapy may interfere with the performance of the drugs, because many chemotherapeutic agents require active oxygen radical to exert their cytotoxic effect. Advances in research, however, suggest that certain antioxidants may act synergistically with certain chemotherapeutic agents.
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