“A non-toxic intervention can effectively treat an aggressive cancer.”
ests conducted by scientists from the University of Southern California and the FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology in Milan conducted tests in mice, to see if combining fasting with higher doses of vitamin C could help fight cancers.
Some previous tests have shown that higher doses of vitamin C can treat some cancers – but the results were mixed. Similarly, fasting has been shown to help fight specific cancers. The USC test was conducted to see if combining the two would improve efficacy.
The test result showed significant slowing of tumour growth in all the mice, whilst in some the tumour growth was reversed. Putting the two separate natural treatments together has boosted the efficacy of each. Further tests will now be taken forward.
“For the first time, we have demonstrated how a completely non-toxic intervention can effectively treat an aggressive cancer,” said Valter Longo, the study senior author and the director of the USC Longevity Institute at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and professor of biological sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “We have taken two treatments that are studied extensively as interventions to delay aging — a fasting-mimicking diet and vitamin C — and combined them as a powerful treatment for cancer.”
People suffering from cancer may find it difficult to fast, but there are low calorie plant-based diets that produce the same effects in the body, and so these will be part of the next tests. The aim is to refine the fasting plus vitamin C treatment to replace chemotherapy.
Maira Di Tano, Franca Raucci, Claudio Vernieri, Irene Caffa, Roberta Buono, Maura Fanti, Sebastian Brandhorst, Giuseppe Curigliano, Alessio Nencioni, Filippo de Braud, Valter D. Longo. Synergistic effect of fasting-mimicking diet and vitamin C against KRAS mutated cancers. Nature Communications, 2020; 11 (1)