Fasting could avert the Toxic Effects of Chemotherapy

Fasting for 48-hours before chemotherapy can help the patients be relieved of the toxic side effects, suggests a new research. Fasting could help could save many healthy cells and give them the upper hand in the treatment.

"The side effects of chemotherapy are one of the major obstacles in fighting the cancer, and this provides a calculated method to protect the great majority of non-cancerous cells," said study co-author Valter D. Longo, an associate professor of biological sciences at the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and the Norris Cancer Center at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Test-tube work and experiments with yeast and mice were conducted to explore ways to reduce the collateral damage that chemotherapy typically produces.

The benefits of fasting have not yet been proven on human patients but mice kept without food for 48-hours before a high dose of chemotherapy continued to thrive while the normally fed mice, when given the same dose of drugs, either dies or showed loss in weight and energy.

Also, it was found in test tube experiments that normal human cells were two to five times more resistant than cancer cells to chemotherapy after a short period of starvation.

In yeast, the difference was up to 1000 fold. "If we get to just a 10-20 fold differential toxicity with human metastatic (spreading) cancers, all of a sudden it's a completely different game against cancer," Dr Longo says. "My hope is that many places around the world will carefully design small clinical trials on starvation and protection against chemotherapy."

The findings were published in the March 31 online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Since fasting is not always possible, a drug can be given to mimic the action and researchers are considering that approach as well.

Dr Felipe Sierra, director of the Biology of Aging Program at the National Institute on Ageing, adds, "This is not just one more anti- cancer treatment that attacks the cancer cells. To me, that's an important conceptual difference."