However, women continue to die of the
disease and new treatment strategies are essential. Cancer
prevention by the use of naturally occurring dietary substances
is considered as a practical approach to reduce the
ever increasing incidence of cancer. The intervention of multistage
carcinogenesis by modulating intracellular signaling
pathways may provide a molecular basis for chemoprevention
with a wide variety of dietary phytochemicals (1). Cancer
cells acquire resistance to apoptosis by overexpression of
antiapoptotic proteins and/or by downregulation or mutation
of proapoptotic proteins. Generally, the growth rate of
preneoplastic or neoplastic cells exceeds that of normal cells
due to dysregulation of their cell growth and cell death machineries.
Therefore, an excellent approach to inhibit the promotion
and progression of carcinogenesis and to remove
genetically deregulated, premalignant and malignant cells
from the body is by inducing cell cycle arrest or apoptosis
using dietary chemopreventive compounds.