Could something as common as table salt be the key to advancing cancer treatment? Recent research offers a surprising and promising role for table salt in enhancing the immune system’s ability to fight cancer, researchers say. Two new studies, published on Aug. 28 in Nature Immunology, reveal that increased salt levels can significantly enhance immune cells’ cancer-killing abilities.
One of the two studies also showed that mice who consumed a high-salt diet also had reduced tumor sizes as a result. “We were very surprised to see that salt instead improved their vigor, metabolism, and killing function and that this also reduced tumor growth in [the] mouse model,” Dr. Christina Zielinski, lead author of one of the studies, told The Epoch Times in an email.
“Salt turned out to be a surprisingly simple [but] overlooked factor” in boosting cancer-killing cells’ effectiveness, Zielinski, who is also the Chair of Infection Immunology at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, added. Mice fed a high-salt diet also had reduced tumor growths due to improved T-cell activity, the researchers found. The researchers found that adding salt to T cells caused a similar effect as exposing the cells to immunotherapy drugs that enhanced their activity.
Study co-author, oncologist, and researcher Agnese Losurdo, said in the press release that a higher sodium level in the blood is associated with a better response to cancer immunotherapy. However, the authors said that a high.