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I am angry. See this article from @ScienceDaily https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200512151941.htm. The claim is this: "A combo of fasting plus vitamin C is effective for hard-to-treat cancers, study shows" and they suggest this research comes out of University of Southern California - technically true.
It shouldn't be the case that some research requires extra care in reporting than others, especially in the field of cancer research. But it is. Vitamin C is certainly one of those research areas. Reporting on cancer treatment claims requires a level of due diligence.
ESPECIALLY when those "treatments" are things people can get a hold of without seeing a doctor. There is a high risk that patients will choose to self treat & avoid seeing their doctor. Which with any form of cancer is dangerous but particularly when they mention "hard to treat".
Any patient has the right to make medical choices for themselves. They have the right to choose not to see a medical professional. But we should be cautious of anything we might do to encourage that particular choice because it is dangerous.
But it's more than just a headline. The article is relatively ok in some ways - it does point out that the study was conducted in mice ( @justsaysinmice) though it doesn't explain that this makes it hard (some would say impossible) to extrapolate in to human patients.
But then it jumps into a quote from the group leader of this research, Dr Valter Longo. If that name seems familiar, there's a reason, you'll see. Quote: "For the first time, we have demonstrated how a completely non-toxic intervention can effectively treat an aggressive cancer,"
This is a damaging quote. Dangerous, irresponsible. That is not what this research shows. I took a look at the paper, published in Nature Communications, titled "Synergistic effect of fasting-mimicking diet and vitamin C against KRAS mutated cancers"
Here's what they showed. 1. in cancer CELL LINES (i.e. not even animal models) that they starved of nutrients then treated with vit C, they saw a rise in cell death compared to controls. It's not hard to kill cancer cells in the lab by combining two things - I've done it myself.
Cancer cells in the lab that have been starved of nutrients are unsurprisingly challenging to keep alive. That doesn't mean that combining nutrient fasting and vitamin C will work in animals or humans (yeah I know humans are animals but you know what I mean) with cancer.
2. tumours transplanted into a mouse model, don't grow, when the mice are given this fast mimicking diet combined with vit C. Interesting, but not enough to prove much. Lots of things stop tumours growing in mice but many of those don't go on to be valuable treatments.
Mice and humans are very different and we have to do much more research to understand what's going on. 3. when you starve CELLS and give them vit C, reactive oxygen species (ROS) increase. That's a bit odd, vitamin C is an antioxidant, it should reduce ROS. But maybe it's a quirk
of these cancer cells, and finding quirks of cancer cells does allow us to find ways to kill them. 4. Something to do w/ iron - this "simple" treatment is getting quite complicated now (that's ok, cancer is complicated) but it seems free iron is a bit higher in cancer CELLS...
that are both starved and treated with vit C. If you mop up the iron OR the ROS with other treatments, you lose the cell death that starvation + vit C causes. So it seems relevant even if it's not clear why. Sorry if this is a bit complicated, I'm moving on shortly, bear with me!
5. there are some effects on important proteins in some important relevant pathways. I won't go into this, it's mainly to show that this really is relevant. This is good practice. But this is still in CELLS. 6. combining fast mimicking diet with vitamin C AND a chemotherapy -
delays tumour progression and prolongs survival in MICE ( @justsaysinmice). Right, so that's the gist of the paper. It's an interesting paper. A lot of their findings are super relevant to things I've researched in the field before and it is interesting enough to study.
The issue is how the findings are promoted in the coverage outside of the scientific journal where the paper was published. Let's go back to that quote: "For the first time, we have demonstrated how a completely non-toxic intervention can effectively treat an aggressive cancer,"
That's not what they've shown. They didn't treat an aggressive cancer. They killed a few cancer cells. And when they combined it with chemotherapy (which isn't completely non-toxic because that's part of the point), they prolonged survival. But not until then.
The claim made, in the @ScienceDaily article (whether it was them who made it or not) is WRONG. Dr Longo continues (in the article) "We have taken two treatments [...] -- a fasting-mimicking diet and vitamin C -- and combined them as a powerful treatment for cancer."
This is simply UNTRUE. He contines: "Our first in vitro experiment showed remarkable effects," - this simply isn't true. I've seen the same effects in vitro in my own research when I was a PhD student, this is not remarkable at all. It's completely expected.
The article ends: "To move toward that goal, they say they needed to first test 2 hypotheses: that their non-toxic combination interventions would work in mice, & that it would look promising for human clinical trials. In this new study, they said that they've demonstrated both."
They haven't. This study has absolutely nothing to do with humans in any way. I can't state that strongly enough. Whether they reference other clinical trials or not there is absolutely no evidence in this study that puts fast mimicking diets w/ vit C as promising in HUMANS.
But who is Dr Longo? Is that at all relevant? I thought I recognised the name, and when I Googled him I realised why. Dr Longo was in that Goop documentary. The one on Netflix, you remember? He talked about fasting and anti-ageing. That's his schtick.
So much so, he has a business and a book and products to sell. Surprise surprise he sells a fast mimicking diet. For a LOT. This is the one Gwyneth Paltrow herself tried on the Goop documentary. The one that left her dizzy and delirious, clutching her stomach in pain.
This is disclosed in the article like this: "V.D.L. has equity interest in L-Nutra, a company that develops medical food. A.N. and I.C. are inventors of three patents of methods for treating cancer by fasting-mimicking diets that were licenced to L-Nutra"
And that disclosure is responsible and correct. It's also disclosed in the @ScienceDaily article, but again, without adequately stressing WHY this is so important. The author, the person quoted in the article making bold and factually inaccurate claims about this study:
has a financial stake in people believing his claims to be true. This coverage is dangerous, it's irresponsible and it's deeply concerning from a science news site. If you see this covered elsewhere, be wary.
This study does not show anything about treating aggressive cancers in HUMANS. Ugh.
