Introduction: Vaccinium oxycoccos or cranberry are evergreen shrubs in the subgenus Oxycoccos of the genus Vaccinium. The aim of this study was to overview anti-carcinoma activity of Vaccinium oxycoccos. Methods: This review article was carried out by searching studies in PubMed, Medline, Web of Science, and IranMedex databases. The initial search strategy identified about 79 references. In this study, 56 studies were accepted for further screening and met all our inclusion criteria [in English, full text, therapeutic effects of Vaccinium oxycoccos and dated mainly from the year 2002 to 2016.The search terms were “Vaccinium oxycoccos”, “therapeutic properties”, “pharmacological effects”. Result: the result of this study showed that Vaccinium oxycoccos possess anti-carcinoma activity against the following cancers: prostate, bladder, lymphoma, ovarian, cervix, breast, lung, and colon. Conclusion: the results from this review are quite promising for the use of Vaccinium oxycoccos as an anti-cancer agent. Vaccinium oxycoccos possess the ability to suppress the proliferation of human breast cancer MCF-7 cells and this suppression is at least partly attributed to both the initiation of apoptosis and the G1 phase arrest.
