Boston College biologists have identified an alternative, diet-based method of treating brain cancer that does not involve administering toxic chemicals, radiation or invasive surgery.
The biologists found that KetoCal, a commercially available high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet designed to treat epilepsy in children, can significantly decrease the growth of brain tumors in laboratory mice. Moreover, the diet significantly enhanced health and survival rates relative to mice in control groups who consumed a standard low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet.
The findings were based on a study published this week in the online journal Nutrition & Metabolism.
"KetoCal represents a novel alternative therapy for malignant brain cancer," said Boston College Biology Professor Tom Seyfried, who conceived and supervised the study. "While the tumors did not vanish in the mice who received the strict KetoCal diet, they got significantly smaller and the animals lived significantly longer. And compared to radiation, chemotherapy and surgery, KetoCal is a relatively inexpensive treatment option."
Malignant brain cancer is one of the most lethal types of cancer in adults and is the second leading cause of cancer death in children. Many current ways of treating the disease fail to provide long-term management because they ineffectively target tumor cells and harm the health and vitality of normal brain cells.
The KetoCal diet gets around this dilemma by essentially starving the brain tumor cells of the sugary molecules on which they rely for growth and survival. Because of its special composition, the diet deprives the tumor cells of the glucose they need; at the same time, the diet provides normal brain cells with ketones, a class of organic compounds they can metabolize effectively but the tumor cells cannot.