It’s been eight days since my last post. Nothing of note has happened in the intervening days. My health is stable; I’m feeling good. Eating normally over the previous ten days has restored my weight. Everything is set up perfectly to bolster my delusion that everything is all right.
Everything is not all right, which is why I’m starting my second episode of finite fasting tonight. After a dinner of asparagus and mint risotto with beer (because someone forgot to bring white wine up from the basement and put it in the fridge), I’m now off to another 72 hours without food. The specialist in Zurich didn’t think much of this approach but didn’t express any serious concerns that I hadn’t been aware of either. He pointed out the danger of losing weight during therapy. “Weakening yourself only helps the cancer”, he said.
Helping the cancer is the last thing I want to do. Fasting appears to stand a good chance of achieving the opposite under two conditions. First, I have to do it within the limits set by my body (see the specialist’s concerns). This one is easy. I have to keep an eye on the bathroom scale and be aware of how I feel. The second one is trickier and I don’t know yet if it’s met.
The anti-oncogenic effect of fasting depends on cancer cells’ urgent requirement of glucose for their growth. Glucose is of course a source of energy, but it’s also required for the synthesis of biomolecules that sustain the high proliferation rate of cancer cells. Without sufficient glucose, DNA cannot be synthesized at the levels required by cancer cells.
This is not all. Consumption of glucose leads to the secretion of insulin, a hormone with oncogenic properties. There is agreement that glucose contributes to cancer progression and resistance to therapy. Had I read about this earlier, I would have long cut sugar from my diet. But does this even help? The body is a complex system, and individual adjustments are unlikely to yield single obvious effects. Glucose is the most abundant carbohydrate in human blood, and there’s very little one can do about it.
The benefits for cancer patients of living on low sugar are far from clear. Fasting isn’t much better. It has been shown to work in mouse models of certain cancers only. Is the metabolism of my KRASG13D adenocarcinoma similar? I don’t know. I’ve tried to find publications but haven’t been very successful. (This one is on my list.) Maybe it’s described in books that I have no access to. This is important information.
On Monday, I got a call from the hospital to schedule the next consultation for next Wednesday. On Friday, my oncologist called to find out whether I’d be up to starting the second chemotherapy program right after that consultation. I equivocated because I would really like to have some answers on fasting, but this is too important a topic to be discussed on the phone. The doctor didn’t insist. She correctly took my hesitation as a sign of a need for a little more time. I hope we’ll have a good discussion on Wednesday. Even if she doesn’t have the answers, she’ll be better placed to get them than me.
0 comments:
Post a Comment