The role and its mechanism of intermittent fasting in tumors: friend or foe?

• 作者: Xu Zhao Jing Yang Ruoyu Huang Mengmeng Guo Ya Zhou Lin Xu
• 来源期刊: 癌症生物学与医学（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2021,（1）
• 所属期刊栏目: REVIEW
• 页码范围: 63-73
• 页数: 11页
• 语种: 英文
• DOI: 10.20892/j.issn.2095-3941.2020.0250

摘要

Intermittent fasting (IF) is becoming a prevailing topic worldwide, as it can cause changes in the body's energy metabolism processes, improve health, and affect the progression of many diseases, particularly in the circumstance of oncology. Recent research has shown that IF can alter the energy metabolism of tumor cells, thereby inhibiting tumor growth and improving antitumor immune responses. Furthermore, IF can increase cancer sensitivity to chemotherapy and radiotherapy and reduce the side effects of these traditional anticancer treatments. IF is therefore emerging as a promising approach to clinical cancer treatment. However, the balance between long-term benefits of IF compared with the harm from insufficient caloric intake is not well understood. In this article, we review the role of IF in tumorigenesis and tumor therapy, and discuss some scientific problems that remain to be clarified, which might provide some assistance in the application of IF in clinical tumor therapy.