Men with prostate cancer who ate a low-fat diet and took fish body oil supplements may have lower risk of cancer recurrence, U.S. researchers say.
Lead author William Aronson of the University of California, Los Angeles, and chief of urologic oncology at the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center, said men with prostate cancer who ate a low-fat diet and took omega-3 supplements had lower levels of pro-inflammatory substances in their blood and a lower cell cycle progression score, a measure used to predict cancer recurrence, than men who ate a "higher fat Western diet."
Lowering the cell cycle progression -- CCP -- score might help prevent prostate cancers from becoming more aggressive, Aronson said.
"We also found that men on the low-fat fish oil diet had reduced blood levels of pro-inflammatory substances that have been associated with cancer," Aaronson said in a statement.
Omega-3 fatty acids have been found to reduce inflammation, and may be protective for other malignancies, Aronson said.
Aronson and colleagues measured levels of the pro-inflammatory substances in the blood and examined the prostate cancer tissue to determine the CCP score.
"This is of great interest, as the CCP score in prostate cancer is known to be associated with more aggressive disease and can help predict which patients will recur and potentially die from their cancer," Aronson said.
Further, Aronson and his team analyzed one pro-inflammatory substance called leukotriene B4 (LTB4) and found that men with lower blood levels of LTB4 after the diet also had lower CCP scores.
"Given this finding, we went on to explore how the LTB4 might potentially affect prostate cancer cells and discovered a completely novel finding that one of the receptors for LTB4 is found on the surface of prostate cancer cells," Aronson said.
The study appears in the early online edition of Cancer Prevention Research.
