A new study shows that intermittent fasting may help women who have triple negative breast cancer, a type of breast cancer that has the worse prognosis due to lacking common therapeutic targets. “Lifestyle intervention like intermittent fasting may provide optimistic prospects to improve prognosis and survival in obesity-associated triple negative breast cancer, reducing obesity and potentially, the mortality burden of triple negative breast cancer,” the research team wrote. According to the study—which reviewed previous research—obesity and being overweight increases women’s risk of getting triple negative breast cancer and also worsens their overall prognosis.
While the study noted that “the association between obesity and triple negative breast cancer is still controversial,” much previous research has been done noting the links between the two. According to the research team, “with regard to cancers, intermittent fasting has been proposed to exert anti-cancer properties, improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy, reduce cancer incidence, support cancer prevention and protect against chemotherapy toxicity.” The research team looked at studies from multiple databases over a period of 20 years.
In addition, the research team ran analyses on overweight mice, injecting them with human breast cancer cells. They found that mice that were obese had a poor overall prognosis. The authors suggested that the obese mice did nothing, they had a poor overall prognosis.
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