Fighting Breast Cancer with Calorie Restriction: Diet Could Help Patients

Calorie restriction has been associated with longevity in the past. Now, scientists have found that this kind of dieting could improve the outcomes for women with breast cancer. The findings reveal a new tool that cancer patients could use to potentially help improve their likelihood of survival.

Breast cancer patients are often treated with hormonal therapy to block tumor growth and steroids to counteract the side effects of chemotherapy which can cause their metabolisms to be drastically altered and actually cause them to gain weight. Since too much weight can make standard treatments for breast cancer less effective, it's important to keep weight in mind.

Calorie restriction is a type of dieting in which food intake is decreased by a certain percentage. That's why scientists decided to see if this type of dieting could impact survival weights.

In this case, the scientists took a look at mice, feeding them a restricted diet. The researchers noticed that microRNAs, a type of RNA that regulates other genes in the cell, decreased the most when mice were treated with both radiation and calorie restriction. More specifically, the two microRNAs the decreased were miR 17 and 20. This decrease resulted in the production of proteins involved in maintaining the extracellular matrix.

"Calorie restriction promotes epigenetic changes in the breast tissue that keep the extracellular matrix strong," said Nicole Simone, one of the researchers, in a news release. "A strong matrix creates a sort of cage around the tumor, making it more difficult for cancer cells to escape and spread to new sites in the body."

Understanding the link to miR 17 also gives researchers a molecular target for diagnosing cancers that are more likely to metastasize and, potentially, for developing a new drug to treat cancers. In the meantime, though, the findings reveal that calorie restriction is another tool for patients to help battle breast cancer in their ongoing recovery.

The findings are published in the journal Breast Cancer Research and Treatment.