Many investigations suggested relations between fat soluble
vitamin levels in blood and incidence of
cancer. These studies are concerning both therapeutical efficiency of
vitamins intake, seric levels and
cancer risk, and the supposed correlation between blood fat soluble
vitamin levels and the
cancer localization. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether the alterations of fat soluble
vitamin levels (A-
vitamin,
beta-carotene and
alpha-tocopherol) were correlated not only to carcinogenic processes but also to the localizations of their developments. In a former article, we have found that an abnormal
ketone derivative of D3
vitamin (1-keto-24-methyl-25-hydroxycholecalciferol) or
carcinomedin was present in the serum of all
cancer patients and absent in that of healthy control subjects. Serum levels of the four above substances were determined in 1068 subjects suffering from differently localized
cancers and in 880 healthy subjects. A statistical multidimensional analysis of data led a separate five groups of
cancer types (p less than 0.001). Within each group alterations of
vitamin spectra, compared to controls, were identical; between groups they were significantly different. These groups were: anal and
intestinal cancer; pancreatic, hepatic, oesophageal and
gastric cancer; laryngeal and
lung cancer; uro-genital and
breast cancer;
brain cancer. All these groups are statistically different from the reference one (p less than 0.001). This grouping roughly corresponds to the embryologic origin of affected organs. This suggests that
carcinogenesis may alter fat soluble
vitamin metabolism, specifically in various forms of
cancer, or these alterations of
vitamin metabolism are in some way involved in the carcinogenic process.