# Dietary Phenolic Compounds as Anticancer Natural Drugs: Recent Update on Molecular Mechanisms and Clinical Trials

## TL;DR

This paper reviews how dietary phenolic compounds can fight cancer by various mechanisms and their potential in clinical settings.

## Contribution

The paper provides an updated overview of molecular mechanisms and clinical evidence for dietary phenolic compounds as anticancer agents.

## Key findings

- Phenolic compounds induce apoptosis, autophagy, and cell cycle arrest in cancer cells.
- They inhibit telomerase and angiogenesis, showing anti-cancer effects in vivo.
- Clinical trials demonstrate their efficacy alone or in combination with chemotherapy drugs.

## Abstract

Given the stochastic complexity of cancer diseases, the development of chemotherapeutic drugs is almost limited by problems of selectivity and side effects. Furthermore, an increasing number of protective approaches have been recently considered as the main way to limit these pathologies. Natural bioactive compounds, and particularly dietary phenolic compounds, showed major protective and therapeutic effects against different types of human cancers. Indeed, phenolic substances have functional groups that allow them to exert several anti-cancer mechanisms, such as the induction of apoptosis, autophagy, cell cycle arrest at different stages, and the inhibition of telomerase. In addition, in vivo studies show that these phenolic compounds also have anti-angiogenic effects via the inhibition of invasion and angiogenesis. Moreover, clinical studies have already highlighted certain phenolic compounds producing clinical effects alone, or in combination with drugs used in chemotherapy. In the present work, we present a major advance in research concerning the mechanisms of action of the different phenolic compounds that are contained in food medicinal plants, as well as evidence from the clinical trials that focus on them.