Video
BETA - Can diet cure myeloma?
Posted by
HealthTree • April 9, 2025
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Richa Parikh, MD
Transcript
Our case reports that have been published around where diet may have led to regression of a tumor or fasting has led to that. And I think we have seen in our pilot study that the M-spike trajectory slowed down for some patients. But these are all cases and it's not a huge study that has proven this to say that it can definitely do it. I think that it's very important that if you are diagnosed with myeloma that you do the standard treatments because we know and they're proven to work. But simultaneously with that enhancing the likelihood of cure by making these lifestyle changes and dietary changes I think is important. I wouldn't recommend just going the route of only doing the diet once myeloma is diagnosed. But I think when we are in the EMGA space or the smoldering myeloma space we have some time because the standard is observation. So in those situations we can consider changing the diet and seeing if that can help slow down the disease. Another thing is that when you think about diet, diet affects the immune system and in a good way, positively if you're eating healthy. When we think about how cancer progresses there are two parts and it's a balance or a fight between the two. It's a fight between the genetics of the cancer or the tumor inherent characteristics and the immune system trying to control that cancer. So it's a balance between the immune system and the cancer. So if we can help the immune system to be stronger to fight the cancer then we may have better outcomes or response and that's what we're trying to do with diet. But when a patient is already diagnosed with a cancer or an advanced cancer, sometimes the cancer has overwhelmed the immune system so much that diet is really not able to take a hold or change the immune system enough to make a difference. So we sometimes need to get the disease burden down and let the immune system get back to its state where then diet may play a bigger role after. So I think we don't have enough information to suggest that but a lot of efforts are being made both in the cancer prevention realm with relation to dietary changes and also to improve outcomes. Like in the cancer prevention space there has been, Dr. Shah has been leading some trials in patients that have MGUS or smoldering myeloma which are the precursor stages for multiple myeloma and to see if we can delay the progression to multiple myeloma from these precursor And then once people do have myeloma, obesity, diabetes, they have shown to actually worsen outcomes after a diagnosis of myeloma and so adopting a dietary intervention that can cause some weight loss or that can help improve sugar control in patients who are diabetic, those would actually help improve outcomes in myeloma but I don't think we can use diet alone to potentially cure the patients of myeloma or at least as of now we don't have a way to do that but I would think of it as adjuncts to the active treatment that people are on for myeloma to improve responses or to improve tolerabilities because some of the medications may have an impact on the gut, may cause diarrhea, may have loss of appetite, patients may have loss of appetite or change in the taste sensation and incorporating certain types of diets might help them gain back a little bit of that weight that they have lost and strength and nutrition and so using diet as an adjunct to active treatment is the way I would look at it
