New Book Discusses Fuda Hospital

By far the most popular post on the occasional blog is the one that advises patients to be cautious about the claims made by the Chinese Fuda Hospital. If you're considering going to this hospital - or know of somebody else who is thinking of it - then please go and read that post.

You can also read about Fuda in a new book that charts the story of a teenage boy with cancer. This memoir, written by his mom, does not make for easy reading. It's a hard story that doesn't end well. But as part of the desperate attempt to save this poor boy's life, he and his father travel to China and spend weeks at Fuda Hospital. It paints a different picture of the place compared to Fuda's very slick and professional marketing.

The book is called 'For The Love of George' by Irene Kappes. It's on sale at Amazon in paperback or Kindle format. More details can be had here:

http://newparadigmpublishing.co.uk/for-the-love-of-george/

Glutamine - Clinical Results

Steve Martin, the author of the original Grouppe Kurosawa blog (i.e. not this one!), was a tireless advocate of methyl jasmonate and oral glutamine supplementation as treatments for cancer. Over the years he made a lot of information known about those substances with really useful links back to the source references for those people who wanted to follow up. While there's been very little work done on methyl jasmonate outside of the lab, the same is not the case for glutamine.

Glutamine is an amino acid and is essential not just for normal cells to function but for tumour cells too. In fact there is plenty of evidence to suggest that along with glucose, glutamine is one of the preferred fuels for tumour growth and progression. So why suggest taking it? Because, as Steve surmised based on the data that was available to him then, it also has several protective effects and may therefore be of more benefit to the body than to the tumours.

Glutamine has been investigated and used clinically to fight many of the side effects from cancer treatments. And it's still being used this way, even though there is this fear that it's directly feeding tumours. A recent paper in the journal BMC Cancer reports back on a trial in advanced lung cancer patients who were given oral glutamine supplementation.

The result? Here's what the conclusion has to say:

In our study, supplementation with Gln during C-CRT had no detectable negative impact on tumor control and survival outcomes in patients with Stage IIIB NSCLC. Furthermore, Gln appeared to have a beneficial effect with respect to prevention of weight loss and unplanned treatment delays, and reduced the severity and incidence of acute- and late-RIE (radiation induced esophagitis.

There was a small improvement in overall survival reported, but it was a small trial and there's no way to know whether that result was a fluke or something more concrete. In any case, the trial shows that high-dose glutamine in these patients certainly did not make matters worse by feeding the tumours, and may indeed even helped by reducing side effects and the need to stop treatment because of it.

The full paper can be found here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2407/12/502

Please note, that this is not a randomised controlled trial, so there's a potential bias in the results, but it is at least suggestion and evidence that oral glutamine may not be as bad as a simple reading might suggest.

Peanut Butter As An Anticancer Food?

Let's be honest when we think of foods with anticancer properties we tend to think of green leafy vegetables, spices like turmeric, berries rich in anthocyanins and of course green teas. What we don't normally think of is a high-fat, high-protein food like peanut butter. Now while it's known that peanuts (not a true nut but a legume) are generally considered healthy, the same can't be said for peanut butter.

However in a recent piece of research discussed here: http://www.eatpositive.co.uk/healthy-peanut-butter/, it appears that consumption of peanut butter by adolescent girls reduced the incidence of breast diseases, including breast cancer.

Snacking causes cancer?

One of the most interesting bits of research that was recently published isn't even about cancer. The paper, 'Time-Restricted Feeding without Reducing Caloric Intake Prevents Metabolic Diseases in Mice Fed a High-Fat Diet', published in the journal Cell Metabolism, looks at the effect of feeding times on a range of metabolic indicators. It shows that by restricting mice to set feeding times and preserving a long fast, the damaging effects of a high-fat and high-carb diet are overcome. Now while cancer isn't mentioned in this research, there are now converging lines of evidence to point to a very strong metabolic component to cancer - and it goes beyond the idea of tumours as being glucose-hungry all the time.

The authors of the paper point out that many people have been encouraged to eat little and often, and that snacking is now endemic in our culture. But the body evolved a set of responses that are cyclic, like the circadian rhythm that controls sleep/wake times. By eating constantly we disrupt this rhythm. Again, there's a link here to cancer in that disrupted circadian rhythms are also implicated in carcinogenesis.

Add to this evidence that selecting fasting improves chemotherapy response (as discussed here: http://www.anticancer.org.uk/2012/02/fasting-and-chemotherapy.html) and you have an argument that says selective fasting, cutting out snacking and taking melatonin to improve circadian rhythms are valid anti-cancer interventions that are not toxic, cheap and can be tried both for cancer-prevention and to improve response to therapy for cancer patients.

Towards An Ideal Anti-cancer Protocol

There was an interesting piece at the Anticancer.Org.Uk website commenting on some new research showing that blocking the mu-opiod receptor pathway (the one exploited by opiate-based medicines such as morphine, fentanyl etc), can slow cancer progression. The source of the article is a journal paper by a group of doctors treating late stage cancer patients with the drug methylnaltrexone (trade name Relistor) for opiate induced constipation. They noticed that patients treated with methylnaltrexone survived for longer than expected. They then followed up in the lab, doing experiments that showed that there is a direct effect of the mu-opiod receptor pathway on disease progression.

While this is plenty interesting, what's also worth pointing out that this is yet another example of an existing drug being shown to have anti-cancer activity. Crafting new drugs from scratch takes years and many millions of dollars, re-using existing drugs is much cheaper as a lot of the trials of toxicity and pharmacology have already been done. The combination of off-label drugs is an area that we are keen to see exapnd. Few of these drugs have direct cancer killing activity, but what they do is act gently to change the environment around the tumours. By attacking the tumour microenvironment you subvert the mechanisms that the tumour puts in place to survive.

A list of some of the most promising off-label drugs with anti-cancer activity include:

• Metformin - targets tumour metabolism, (read up on the reverse warburg effect, for example)
• Statins - targets the mevalonate pathway (starves the tumour of esential building blocks for cell proliferation)
• Aspirin - targets the inflammatory environment
• Beta-blockers - targets the beta-adrenergic pathway
• Naltrexone and methylnatrexone - target the mu-opiod receptor pathway

What we would like to see is a clinical trial that uses combinations of these drugs to target the tumour microenvironment. These drugs have relatively low toxicity, they're cheap and together they attack multiple pathways giving less room for the tumours to evolve resistance. Throw in some omega 3s, some polyphenols and some exercise and you have the ideal anti-cancer protocol.

Li Fraumeni Syndrome

The TP53 gene is one of the major anti-cancer genes in the body. It's the tumour suppressor gene most often knocked out in tumours, which makes those tumours more resistant to treatment. As with many genes, there are a small set of people who are born with the gene knocked out in some way. With TP53, this can lead to a condition called Li Fraumeni Syndrome - which means people born with the damaged TP53 gene are very susceptible to developing cancer.

Often Li Fraumeni sufferers will develop rare sarcomas in childhood, and can develop multiple primary cancers over the years. It's a rare condition, thankfully, but for sufferers things can be grim. There are no cures (gene therapy is still a long way off), and many people are ignorant of the syndrome. A new site has been started to raise the profile of the condition, to provide a forum for sufferers and their families and to publish useful information.

The site is published by the George Pantziarka TP53 Trust, and the URL to visit is http://www.tp53.co.uk

If not glutamine, how about arginine?

As previously mentioned on this blog, glutamine has been advocated as a supplement for cancer patients, but it's still a controversial subject. On the one hand there is some laboratory evidence that supplemental glutamine can boost the immune response of patients, it can improve anti-oxidant status in normal cells but not tumour cells and has had some clinical use already. On the minus side it is known that glutamine is a prime food for tumour cells - probably second only to glucose. So, the question is does taking glutamine help the patient or the tumour? For the moment there's no clear answer to this.

Glutamine is an essential amino acid, but an article on Anticancer.org.uk reports on a new study of a different amino acid - arginine. In this study supplemental arginine is shown to partially reverse the suppression of the immune system invoked by glioblastoma (brain cancer) tumours. It looks like an interesting piece of work that's worth following up.

The article is worth a read: http://www.anticancer.org.uk/2011/11/arginine-glioblastoma-and-immune-system.html