Animals predisposed to liver cancer can avoid it by low-fat diet
Two strains of mice were compared in a study, one predisposed to cancer and the other not, and it was discovered that a high-fat diet increased the risk of the susceptible to cancer mice, to develop liver cancer.
Investigators from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Case Western Reserve University studied hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a type of liver cancer that is one of the leading causes of cancer death worldwide. Obesity, type 2 diabetes and metabolic diseases are associated with 30% of the cases of HCC.
John Lambris, Ph.D., the Dr. Ralph and Sallie Weaver Professor of Research Medicine at Penn and senior co-author of the study said “The connection between obesity and cancer is not well understood at this point”, but the researchers try to detect precancerous conditions related to diet through the development of blood tests.
Hepatitis B and C viral infections, exposure to the fungal toxin aflatoxin, chronic alcohol use, or genetic liver diseases represent the other 70% of HCC cases.
Only 10 to 20 percent of hepatocellular carcinoma can be surgically removed, if that option is not possible than death usually comes in three to six months. This type of liver cancer causes about 700,000 deaths worldwide per year.
The tests on high-fat and low-fat diet on mice proved that the strain called C57BL/6J was susceptible to non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and hepatocellular carcinoma on a high-fat, but not a low-fat diet. The strain named A/J encountered no such susceptibility no matter the diet.
The diets lasted almost 500 days, at the end of these period, mice predisposed to develop cancer showed characteristics of NASH, like inflammation, fibrosis and even cirrhosis, but if they changed to low-fat diet, these outcomes were reversed.
“The reason these findings are so provocative is that it relates to diet and we now have a unique model we know will develop cancer,” says Lambris.
The work was funded by the National Center for Research Resources and the Charles B. Wang Foundation.
