Eating less may help chemotherapy do its job
10:12 a.m. Tuesday, April 1, 2008
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In treating cancer, too little chemotherapy and the tumors survive; too much can be life-threatening.
Now researchers led by Valter Longo at the University of Southern California have found that in lab tests, not eating for 48 hours before chemo gives healthy cells an edge.
"Starvation tells the, all the cells to, in an organism, go into protective mode. Right? The cancer cells, because of their characteristics of not being able to respond to that, just continue on their normal pro-growth track," Longo said.
Scientists know from experiments with everything from tiny worms to primates that a lack of food sends cells into a protective mode that can actually extend life. Cancer cells keep dividing, even when faced with starvation.
Longo wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that a 48-hour starvation period helped protect the healthy cells of mice from doses of cancer-killing chemotherapy.
"The animals are running around after about five to ten-fold higher doses than the maximum one allowed for patients," Longo said.
But, Longo notes starving cancer patients before treatment is not a good idea. So, he's researching diet modifications that could do the same thing. "Just a few changes, very specific changes in the diet and all of a sudden, at least the animals in our case, are now very resistant again to very high doses of chemo," he said.
Ultimately, Longo would like to see a medication that might give doctors a new strategy, starving out cancer
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