CancerDialysis 2.0 !
Author: Sture Hobro
As described in post 15, the ketogenic diet (KD) and intermittent fasting have been proven to be good adjuvant therapies to traditional cancer treatments. The mechanism behind this is that these diets interfere with cancer’s ability to handle oxidative stress and escape immune responses.
Glucose (and glutamine) is needed for cancer cells for proliferation and survival. Cancer cells depend heavily on glucose to handle oxidative stress and to create an immune-suppressing environment.
In the new article (post 33), we have gained a new understanding of how hashtagCancerDialysis will work in conjunction with the liver, which acts as the energy distributor in the human body. Today, we understand that a small amount of insulin is needed to break the gluconeogenesis in the liver when glucose levels are reduced by dialysis. By ensuring normal insulin during dialysis, it will be possible to reach very low glucose levels during the CancerDialysis treatment by reducing glucose directly from the blood and ensuring that the liver is not working overtime to supply glucose to the blood.
However, it will be necessary to ensure another substrate for energy production in healthy cells, and we will need to support the liver with exogenous ketones and/or MCT oil. By doing so, ketone levels can rapidly reach levels that are typically only seen after long-term starvation.
The figure below shows a comparison between different types of “ketogenic” treatments (see post 15) and their effect on glucose and ketone levels in the blood. Before, we suggested that glucose levels could only be reduced to around 3 mmol/L. However, a better understanding of how the liver, insulin, glucose, and dialysis interact makes it clear that levels down to 1 mmol/L (or even below) may be possible to achieve during dialysis. To make that possible, we need to support the liver/human with exogenous energy to ensure another energy substrate than glucose as an alternative for healthy cells to use when glucose levels are low.
