My oncologist just told me that there is 42% reduced risk of recurrence for HER2+ ER - cancer survivors who eat a very low fat diet.
http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/dec2006/nci-19.htm
After a median of five years of follow-up, breast cancer recurrence or new breast cancers occurred in 9.8 percent of the women on the low-fat diet and in 12.4 percent of those on the standard diet. This amounted to a 24 percent reduction in the relative risk of recurrence for the women on the low-fat diet. The largest risk reduction — 42 percent — appeared to be among women on the low-fat diet whose tumors did not respond to the presence of the hormone estrogen. The risk reduction was 15 percent in women who did respond to estrogen. Breast cancer that doesn’t respond to estrogen is called estrogen receptor negative (ER-negative) and usually has a poorer outcome than ER-positive disease. “Reductions were predicted in women with ER-positive disease because of the association between fat intake and estrogen levels but the effect on ER-negative disease is, if verified, a surprising and potentially important observation regarding breast cancer and signals a possible new avenue of research,” said John Milner, Ph.D., Chief of the Nutritional Science Research Group at NCI.
Threaded Mode