When you get diagnosed with cancer it can be one of the most frightening experiences of your life. Fortunately, of course, medical science has now advanced to the point where there are a number of positive ways to treat the disease. One of these is radiation therapy and it has proved to be one of the most vital tools in fighting cancer.
Nevertheless, the condition itself is still a worry and it’s natural to look for any way you can to help the treatment succeed so you can beat cancer and return to your normal life. It seems that one of those ways could be dieting. Research suggests that reducing your calorie intake while going through radiation therapy could help make the treatment more effective by helping to shrink tumours.
The review, published in Oncologist, looked at mice that were given radiation treatment. The results found a 30 percent reduction in the tumour size for the mice that had a reduced-calorie diet, and also suggested that these mice were living longer than those on a normal diet throughout the treatment.
Now the research is moving forward a clinical trial set to begin very shortly using human breast cancer patients to see if the results can be matched. This study will allow the researchers to determine the other benefits such as toxicity, recurrence, and survival.
The idea of reducing calories either to help shrink tumours or just generally aid radiation therapy had not really been considered until recently. However it has been shown that this type of diet can alter molecular pathways that make cancer cells more susceptible to radiation. Hopefully this will work in humans too and make the radiation therapy more effective.
It seems that in the battle against cancer, we don’t always need new treatments. We just need to new ways to make the treatments work better.
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