Fasting may help cancer treatment

Healthy cells that don't receive nourishment for a few days become more resistant to stress, study finds.

Last update: April 4, 2008 - 7:45 PM

Starving mice for a few days before chemotherapy protected their healthy cells from damaging side effects, offering a possible way to shield cancer patients from the debilitating hair loss, nausea and anemia that comes with treatments, researchers reported this week.

The study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could also allow the use of higher chemotherapy doses without endangering patients.

Valter Longo of the University of Southern California, who led the research, said healthy cells deprived of nourishment stop dividing and become more resistant to stress. That makes them less vulnerable to chemotherapy, which targets cells that are dividing.

Because cancer cells do not respond to their environment in a normal way, starvation does not protect them from the drugs, said Longo, who did the research with scientists at USC and Giannina Gaslini Institute in Genoa, Italy.

The experiment looked at how healthy and cancerous cells reacted when they were exposed to toxins after being denied glucose, a simple sugar. Yeast cells, for example, were 1,000 times more resistant to damage from chemotherapy than yeast cells containing a tumor gene. An experiment in mice confirmed the protective effects of fasting.

BIRTH CONTROL CHOICES IN MIDLIFE

Birth control choices are wider these days for women 40 and older -- a group that once viewed its options as pretty much limited to tube-tying surgery and condoms. For them, the pill is back. So is the IUD. Both are safer than they used to be. There's even a nonsurgical method of tube-tying.

This variety of methods has long been needed, experts say, because 40- and 50-somethings are a complex group. Some have had several children and are willing to have sterilization surgery. Others may want children, but not right now.

A review of the current science of contraception and women 40 and older was published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine. The author, University of Florida gynecologist Dr. Andrew Kaunitz, noted that the risk of dangerous blood clots rises sharply at age 40 for women who take birth control pills containing estrogen.

The risk is even greater for overweight women.

But the dosage of estrogen in current birth control pills has been dramatically reduced. The pill is now considered a safe alternative for lean, healthy, older women, Kaunitz and other experts said.

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