Prevention is Always the Best Medicine
Prevention is always the best and easiest way to avoid disease. We are all aware of the lifestyle adjustments necessary to prevent heart disease and diabetes, but beyond smoking, the necessary lifestyle adjustments to prevent cancer are not always clear.
Dr. Seyfried of Boston College contends a periodic fast may be the best way to prevent cancer – suggesting nascent cancer cells would be unable to survive the energetic stress created from lowering blood glucose followed by ketone body elevation. For sure, cancer cells are far easier to kill in the very early stages of the disease, once metastasis occurs the cancer cells become a completely different animal, much more robust and aggressive – much more difficult to treat.
What about glycolytic inhibitors – the small molecules known to block glucose energy metabolism – could they play a preventative role?
Researchers at the University Of Washington School Of Medicine decided to test 3-bromopyruvate – to see if it could prevent lung cancer from occurring in mice.
The researchers administered a powerful carcinogen, known to cause lung cancer. Two weeks later, they let the mice inhale an aerosolized form of the glycolytic inhibitor 3-bromopyruvate (inhaled 3-bromopyruvate avoided liver toxicity.) The researchers then monitored the mice over the next 20 weeks recording both tumor number and size.
How affective was the aerosolized 3-bromopyruvate as a chemo preventive agent? “As expected, aerosolized 3-bromopyruvate similarly significantly decreased tumor multiplicity and tumor load by 49% and 80%, respectively, at a dose of 10 mg/mL by inhalation. Interestingly, the efficacy of aerosolized 3-bromopyruvate did not accompany any liver toxicity indicating that it is a safer route of administering this compound.”
These results are exciting because cancer prevention is something everyone can get behind, but they also provide additional evidence in support of metabolic dysfunction as the origin of cancer.
Read the original study here.
Given the massive pharmaceutical market surrounding cardiovascular disease prevention, (think statins like Lipitor and Crestor) therapies related to cancer prevention remain non-existent. Don’t smoke – that’s about all physicians currently have to offer. Hopefully these results are just the beginning of therapies utilized for the prevention of cancer.