Fasting leukemia and mice

[Research123]

Interesting article on leukemia, fasting and mice:

labroots.com/trending/cance...

I'm doing a fairly brutal 6 day water and coffee only fast. I did do fasting and my numbers went down then up a little (although still way below starting point) then on lockdown no fasting and a year later they had gone up a lot and have continued to do so.....so will see how this fasting helps ( next test in under a month)

[AussieNeil Partner Administrator]

While fasting might prove beneficial with CLL, your mice study of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (ALL, is not a particularly good choice in support of doing so. While ALL is usually a B-Cell cancer, it is an acute blood cancer, which occurs early in the lymphocyte life cycle (hence the blasts) and is predominantly a childhood cancer.

With respect to your blood count numbers, I'd be interested in your trends for your absolute lymphocytes and your haemoglobin, platelets and neutrophils and perhaps your other white cell types. The latter may exhibit download trends if your CLL is driven into your bone marrow. If your research budget extends to further testing, following your Lactate Dehydrogenase (LD or LDH), could be informative and not that expensive to include, along with a more expensive Beta-2 Microglobulin (B2M) test. LDH provides an independent assessment of the activity of your CLL tumour load and there's a known correspondence between B2M and overall survival. In my experience, the biggest cause of high LDH counts is poor blood taking.

I doubt your research budget extends to paying for CT scans to check for changes in your spleen and internal nodes, but is your specialist prepared to give an assessment on what they find from their examination, or do you have some external nodes you can measure?

Given CLL primarily derives its energy from lipids (fats), not glucose sciencedirect.com/science/a... I'm not sure how fasting will affect overall tumour growth.

Neil

[Research123 in reply to AussieNeil]

Thank you Neil I'll see what I can find on copies I've got of the counts. I hadn't realised that fat was a bad thing with CLL actually I'd assumed the reverse. So I'd cut back on carbs hugely but increased peanuts to get my calories there- is that a very bad idea?

[AussieNeil Partner Administrator in reply to Research123]

We don't know how carbohydrates vs fats influences progression.

[SeymourB]

Research123 -

The links in the article to the study no longer work. I found other papers by the author mentioned. I think this is the paper, though:

nature.com/articles/nm.4252 (abstract only)

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...

Fasting selectively blocks development of acute lymphoblastic leukemia via leptin-receptor upregulation

The study was done in mice with ALL or AML, not CLL. In particular, they did not get the same result with AML. ALL is a very different disease from CLL in many respects, and generally attacks young children.

I did a PubMed search on (fasting) AND (chronic lymphocytic leukemia), and found nothing similar in the 20 results. The closest thing was a study on timing of ibrutinib and meals:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl...

The effect of food on the pharmacokinetics of oral ibrutinib in healthy participants and patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia

It concluded that plasma levels of ibrutinib after fasting were only 60% of levels when taken from 30 min before to 2 h after food-intake.

=seymour=

[MaxSmart in reply to SeymourB]

Seymour, thanks for looking into this. Does this mean but it’s probably better to have Ibrutinib close to meal time vs. right after waking up or just before going to sleep?

[SeymourB in reply to MaxSmart]

I don't know that the ibrutinib study that I happened to find is the last word on daily dosage timing.

The manufacturer sheet echoes the the observation that a meal boosts the bioavailabity of the drug:

imbruvica.com/files/prescri...

I would hope that hemo-oncologists instruct patients carefully on dose timing, as well as hydration, and warn about things like other drugs and foods that could boost or cut the effect of therapy.

I am not in treatment yet. I defer to forum members with much more experience. I only want to point out that radical changes in diet can have unexpected effects in our population, and that we should be cautiously skeptical.

Talk to your doctor before attempting any such change, whether in treatment or not.

=seymour=

[MaxSmart in reply to SeymourB]

This is great information. Thanks

[Splash24]

I believe fasting had a very positive effect of my numbers, keep me posted, thanks

[nuji]

All the best