A French study in mice shows that calorie reduction could increase the effectiveness of certain cancer treatments.
Should we put on a diet when suffering from cancer in order to make its treatment more effective? The question may sound barbaric, but studies have shown that a diet low in sugar and fat lowers the risk of cancer while obesity increases it. This link between body size, diet and cancer is well established. This is why a team of Inserm, from the Mediterranean Molecular Medicine Center in Nice, investigated whether reducing food intake could affect the effectiveness of treatments. And the answer is positive in animals! In mice with lymphoma, subjected to a 25% calorie restriction for about 20 days, the median life expectancy increased from 30 days to 41 days.
How can this be explained? The researchers observed in these mice that calorie restriction reduced by nearly 40% the expression of genes involved in the occurrence of cancer. In the case of these mice, it was the oncogenes, Mcl-1, present in tumor cells. “These results indicate that calorie restriction modulates the expression of an oncogene and that this increases the efficacy of a drug that is not active against this oncogene. In this experiment, we tested a very specific therapeutic molecule. But these results could relate to other anticancer therapies, explains Jean-Ehrland Ricci, specialist in molecular biology and co-author of the work. However, calorie restriction is not recommended in cancer patients. It weakens patients and has other repercussions. We therefore need to establish a therapeutic window for this restriction. For this, we will test whether a low calorie diet limited to a few days before chemotherapy allows the same results to be obtained. In addition, in this experiment, we reduced by a quarter the total food intake of animals. Maybe just reducing the intake of sugars or fats would be enough. This is what we must also verify, ”explained the researcher from the Mediterranean Center for Molecular Medicine.
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