This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Drug Therapy, Other  • Oncology  • Alert me on articles by topic

Tracy Hampton, PhD

JAMA. 2008;299(17):2017.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Fasting for 2 days protects healthy cells against chemotherapy, according to animal studies conducted at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (Raffaghello L et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 10.1073/pnas.0708100105 [published online ahead of print March 31, 2008]). The cell-protective effects of starvation had previously been demonstrated in antiaging studies.

Researchers found that mice given a high dose of chemotherapy after fasting continued to thrive while half of the normally fed mice died and half experienced lasting weight loss. Importantly, the chemotherapy extended the life span of mice injected with cells from an aggressive human tumor, and the animals later gained back the weight they had lost due to food deprivation.

Laboratory studies of normal human brain cells and cancerous brain cell lines that underwent a short period of starvation (low glucose) revealed that normal cells also became resistant to chemotherapy, . . . [Full Text of this Article]