Keto Diet and Lymphoma Treatment

Fascinating news last week: a clinical trial will start soon that will examine the effect of diet on a specific lymphoma treatment.

Two things worth paying attention to here.

First, the study itself: Lymphoma patients will be given Copanlisib (also known as Aliqopa), a PI3K inhibitor. (Copanlisib is approved for relapsed Follicular Lymphoma, though I don't know which types of Lymphoma will be involved in the study.) PI3Ks work by effecting how a cell (like a cancer cell) takes in glucose, the sugar that a cancer cell needs to grow. Interrupt the food supply, and you mess with the cancer's survival.

However, researchers have known for a long time that the body's natural reaction, creating insulin, can mess with the effectiveness of the PI3K inhibitor. So, this study will look at whether or not a ketogenic diet will increase the effectiveness of the inhibitor. A Keto diet (as it is known) involves eating high percentages of fat and low percentages of carbohydrates (which can raise blood glucose levels). So a keto diet, taken while a patient is on the PI3K inhibitor, might help make it more effective. A study on mice shows that this is a possibility.


That in itself is pretty fascinating to me.

But there's a second thing that's worth paying attention to.

I saw this posted on a couple of different places online, and the immediate reaction to it from some lymphoma patients was to announce that they were going to start following the keto diet.

Slow down.

The research is not about whether the keto diet will help your cancer. It's about whether the diet will help make a specific type of cancer treatment more effective.

In fact, following the diet could do the opposite, and harm you. From another article on this research: The researchers say "they would discourage patients from putting themselves on diets after reading about the latest findings. There is no evidence that the ketogenic diet, for instance, would be helpful on its own – in fact, for leukaemia it appeared to accelerate the disease’s progress."

Let's make that really clear: for one type of blood cancer, the keto diet doesn't help, it actually make the cancer become more aggressive.

It's so important to read carefully.

I've been dealing with FL for over 10 years, so I get the impulse to look for easy answers -- eat this, not that, and your deadly disease will go away.

And I get the impulse to believe it when you heard that a friend of a friend did just that -- ate the goji berries, did yoga every day, bounced on a trampoline, visualized the tumors getting smaller, whatever -- but without rigorous studies of those things, under controlled conditions, none of it means anything. [And those are all things that people advised me to do to cure my cancer.]

I'm not saying diet or exercise isn't important, or that the keto diet doesn't work (I have a friend who is diabetic who swears by it). I am saying that until I get some legitimate scientific answers, I'm not going to entrust my life with it.

And this study is part of a larger series of studies that will focus on "rethinking human diets for cancer." That's great -- we need strong, evidence-based studies that will give us a real sense of how elements of our diets might effect us as patients.

I look forward to seeing how this trial plays out -- it looks like it will start up in October. I'll post any new info I see. I'm all for supporting clinical trials for Lymphoma, but even more, I'm all for supporting trials that might help us slow down and think more carefully about things like diet that might hurt us as much as we wish they could help us.