Reporter and Curator: Dr. Sudipta Saha, Ph.D.
Word Cloud By Danielle Smolyar
Cancer is one of the most devastating and widespread diseases today. The development of cancer is a multi-step process involving genetic or epigenetic changes often occurring over a longer period of time. Moreover, cancer occurs in more or less all organs and tissues and is characterized by extensive heterogeneity both concerning the type and aggressiveness of the disease. Although some substantial progress in some areas has been made, there are still huge unmet needs in treatment methods and the efficacy of currently available drugs. The pharmaceutical industry has struggled with the ever increasing costs in drug development and unfortunately novel drugs have not seldom demonstrated only marginal improvement in efficacy often at the cost of quality of life of the patients. For these reasons, new approaches are focusing on disease prevention instead of only treating the symptoms. Recently, much attention has been paid to prevention of the disease in parallel to continuous drug discovery.
Intervention in food intake has been demonstrated to play an enormous role in both prevention as well as treatment of diseases. Numerous studies indicate a clear link between cancer and diet. The substantial development of sequencing technologies has resulted in access to enormous amounts of genomics information, which resulted in the establishment of nutrigenomics as an emerging approach to link genomics research to studies on nutrition. Increased understanding has demonstrated how nutrition can influence human health both at genetic and epigenetic levels. It investigates the effects of nutrition and bioactive food compounds on gene expression. This approach has allowed the investigation of the effect on nutrition on individuals with specific genetic features. Moreover, it has provided the basis for nutritional intervention in prevention and treatment of disease and the inauguration of personalized nutrition. However, differences in types of cancer, the level of aggressiveness, and their occurrence at different stages of life have seriously complicated the understanding of the effect of nutrition on cancer prevention and treatment. Other individual variations such as the amounts of food consumed, digestion, metabolism and other factors like geographical, ethnic and sociological diversity has hampered the identification of which food components are most important for human health. Dramatic dietary modifications have proven essential in reducing risk and even prevention of cancer. Moreover, intense revision of diet in cancer patients has revealed significant changes in gene expression and also has provided therapeutic efficacy even after short-term application.
Obviously, a multitude of diets have been evaluated, but probably the common factor for achieving both prophylactic and therapeutic responses is to consume predominantly diets rich in fruits, vegetables, fish and fibers and reduced quantities of especially red meat. There are numerous examples of how dietary intake can promote health on both a preventive as well as therapeutic level. Radical change in diet has resulted in dramatic changes in gene expression in prostate cancer patients revealing that many of those genes involved in cancer development were down-regulated. The importance of nutrigenomics as a multi-task approach involving genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, et cetera has further provided novel possibilities to address the effect of nutrition on human health. Despite encouraging findings on how dietary modifications can prevent disease and restore health, there are a number of factors which complicate the outcome. There are variations in response to dietary changes depending on age and gender. However, the vast amount of accumulated nutrigenomics data should not overshadow the needs to take into account other important factors such as lifestyle, social, geographical and economic factors affecting diet and health.
Source References:
http://www.lifescienceglobal.com/home/cart?view=product&id=121
http://www.frontiersin.org/Nutrigenomics/10.3389/fgene.2011.00091/abstract
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002822308021871
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/89/5/1553S
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438350800390X
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