Starving the body of food for a couple of days could help in the fight against cancer, according to new research.
Scientists have discovered that a 48-hour fast seems to protect the body’s healthy cells against the toxic effects of chemotherapy drugs.
The breakthrough could provide a solution to a problem that has confounded cancer experts for years – how to target chemotherapy so it destroys cancer cells but leaves healthy ones intact.
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Chemotherapy given both before and after surgery to remove liver metastases (secondary cancers) improves progression free survival over surgery alone in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer, concludes a study published recently in The Lancet. The phase III European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) study demonstrated that perioperative chemotherapy (i.e. that given before and after surgery) was compatible with major liver surgery.
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Regular monitoring with positron emission tomography (PET) scanning – which detects changes in the function of cells – achieves earlier detection of recurrences of colorectal cancer than conventional scanning that simply looks at the structure of body tissues, a prospective study has shown.
Colorectal cancer – cancer affecting the lower part of the digestive tract – is the second most common cause of cancer-related deaths in Western countries. Most people newly diagnosed with the disease undergo surgery to completely remove their tumour. However, approximately half of people who have curative surgery go on to develop recurrent disease. The median survival after surgery is two years. Adjuvant chemotherapy – anticancer drug treatment given just after surgery – improves the prognosis, but one-third of patients having this treatment still suffer a recurrence within two years after surgery.
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Patients with breast cancer who developed anemia during chemotherapy had nearly three times the risk of local recurrence as those who did not, according to a study published in the April 1 issue of Clinical Cancer Research¸ a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.
“We speculate that there may be an interaction between chemotherapy/radiotherapy and anemia,” said lead researcher Peter Dubsky, MD, a senior consultant in the department of surgery at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. “Both treatment modalities have been shown to be less effective in anemic patients. Since we do not see the effect in terms of relapse-free survival, the interaction with local adjuvant treatment may play a more important role.”
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The use of combination chemotherapy following surgery did not improve survival in patients with gastric cancer, according to a randomized clinical trial published online March 11 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The only potentially curative therapy currently available for non-metastatic gastric cancer is surgery. Recent studies have suggested that a combination of cisplatin, epirubicin, 5-fluorouracil and leucovorin (PELF) improves outcome in patients with metastatic gastric cancer.
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