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29.05.2021

Fasting for a few days makes chemotherapy more effective

If women with breast cancer combine their chemotherapy with short fasting cycles, the chemotherapy becomes a lot more effective. Dutch oncologists come to this conclusion in a human study that was published in Nature Communications.

Study
The researchers divided about 130 women with early breast cancer, which had not yet spread throughout the body, into two groups. The women received 8 chemotherapy treatments.

One group ate normally during the treatments [regular diet]. The other group received meal replacements specially developed for cancer patients 3 days before chemotherapy, plus on the day of chemotherapy. This reduced the intake of energy to 1200 to 200 kilocalories per day.

The meal replacements are developed by Valter Longo. Read a bit more about his fasting mimicking diet here.

Hard to keep up
Fasting is difficult, and not for everyone. Of all three subjects in the fasting mimicking diet, only one was able to sustain the fasting cycles. You can see this above.

More effective
The fasting mimicking diet before and on the day the women received their chemotherapy improved the effectiveness of the treatment.

When the researchers compared biopsies of the tumors from before the chemo treatment with tissues from after the treatment, they saw the fasting mimicking diet increased the chance of a reduction in the number of cancer cells by more than 90 percent by a factor of 4.

The fasting mimicking diet was also effective according to scans of the tumors. Although this relationship was only visible in the women who managed to stick to the diet, the drastic calorie reduction increased the chance of full or partial success of the treatment.

Conclusion
"The results of this study are the first to suggest that fasting mimicking diet cycles are safe and effective as an adjunct to chemotherapy in women with early breast cancer", the researchers summarize their findings.

"These findings together with preclinical data encourage further exploration of the benefits of fasting [...] in patients receiving a wide range of cancer therapies."

Source:
Nat Commun. 2020 Jun 23;11(1):3083.

More:
Omega-3 fatty acids prevent breast cancer from spreading to bones 10.05.2021
Leafy vegetables, broccoli and blueberries, no juices | 4 nutrition tips to survive breast cancer 30.03.2021
Surviving breast cancer with fewer & slower carbohydrates 16.03.2021

Archives:
Cancer Prevention & Survival
Intermittent Fasting
Breast Cancer

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