Diet Affects Chemotherapy Effectiveness, Research Shows Health

Discovery opens important new avenues in medical research. Researchers report that it can have a significant impact on predicting the correct dose and better controlling the side effects of chemotherapy. This finding also helps explain the differences in patient response to chemotherapy that have traditionally puzzled physicians.

“We believe in the eye when we first observe that altering the microbe or adding a single amino acid to the diet can turn a harmless dose of the drug into something very toxic.” “Eyeleen O’Rourke, Dr. UVA’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Department of Cell Biology of Medicine, and Robert M. Byrne’s Center for Cardiovascular Research understand what’s happening with molecular resolution.” To do this, we screened hundreds of microbial and host genes, and the answer was a surprisingly complex network of interactions between diet, microbes, drugs, and the host.”

How food affects your results

Physicians have long recognized the importance of nutrition in human health. However, according to a news release issued by the University of Virginia, the new findings underscore how microbes in us affect us as well as the microbes in us.

The diet-induced changes in microbes could increase the toxicity of chemotherapeutic drugs by a factor of 100, researchers have found using a new lab model created in Ascaris.

“When you add milligrams of the amino acid serine to your diet, the same dose of drugs that do nothing in the control diet kills (roundworms),” said Wenfan Ke, a graduate student and lead author of a new scientific paper. .. Survey results.

In addition, different dietary and microbial combinations alter the way the host responds to chemotherapy. “This data shows that a single dietary change can alter microbial metabolism, resulting in altered or reversible host response to drugs,” the study said. Report in a paper published in Nature Communications.

In short, this means that we eat not only ourselves, but the more than 1,000 species of microbes that live inside each of us, and how to feed these bugs is a dedication to our health and treatment. It has a great influence on the reaction. One day, the doctor may give the patient not only a prescription, but also detailed dietary guidelines and a personally prescribed microbial cocktail to help them reach their best results.

Researchers have previously observed that microbes and diet affect treatment outcomes. But since the first time the underlying molecular processes have been fully analyzed, new research stands out, the news release said.

The researchers’ new model is a very simplified version of the complex microbial community-populations of microorganisms-found in people. Roundworms act as hosts and non-pathogenic E. coli represent the gut microbes. In people, the relationship between diet, microbes, and hosts is very complex, and understanding this will be a major challenge for future scientists.

The research team noted that drug developers need to take steps to clarify the effects of diet and microbes while working in the laboratory. For example, they need to take into account whether the diet can cause microorganisms to produce substances called metabolites that can interfere with or enhance the effects of drugs.

Researchers suggest that the complexities of interactions between drugs, hosts, and microbiomes are probably “astronomical”. More research is needed, but the resulting understanding helps physicians “realize the full therapeutic potential of the microbiome,” they say.

“It’s very likely that we could develop a drug that could improve the outcome of treatment by controlling the microbes that live in the intestine,” said Oruke. “But the complexity of the interactions between diet, microbes, therapies and hosts revealed in this study is modest. To reveal how to fully exploit the therapeutic potential of microbes, It requires a lot of basic research, including good computer modeling.”