Fatty Western diets make prostate cancer more aggressive - but a new type of statin could control the disease, new study claims

  • Researchers at Harvard and Beth Israel have made a 'breakthrough' discovery about how prostate cancer is fueled
  • They found fatty diets drive tumors to spread around the body
  • The team also found a cholesterol-fighting drug could control the spread 

A high-fat American diet of fast food and processed meats fuels the spread of prostate cancer, new research has shown.  

However, experiments found a cholesterol-fighting drug boosted genes which shut down the cells' fat-production, bringing the disease under control.

The link between fat-laden foods and cancers including those of the prostate - the most common form among men - is well-known.

But the researchers have now shed fresh light on the genetic mechanisms that boost spread, and how diet plays a pivotal role.

For prostate cancer sufferers whose disease 'metastasizes' or spreads it is often fatal - and the typical Western diet is a key driver

For prostate cancer sufferers whose disease 'metastasizes' or spreads it is often fatal - and the typical Western diet is a key driver

Experts have hailed the discovery as a 'breakthrough' to tackling the notoriously hard-to-treat disease. 

Senior author Dr Pier Pandolfi, professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, explained: 'It was as though we'd found the tumors' lipogenic - or fat production - switch.

'The implication is, if there's a switch, maybe there's a drug with which we can block this switch and maybe we can prevent metastasis or even cure metastatic prostate cancer.'

When mice were given the therapy - dubbed 'fatostatin' - their tumors shrank dramatically.

This was through blocking the prostate cancer's production of fat - a process known as 'lipogenesis'.

Fatostatin is a compound discovered in 2009 that is currently being investigated for the treatment of obesity.

Professor Pandolfi and colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School in Boston, tested it in lab mice.

He said: 'The obesity drug blocked the lipogenesis fantastically and the tumors regressed and didn't metastasize.'

THE WESTERN DIET EXPLAINED 

The Western diet is loosely defined as one full of fatty and sugary foods, such as burgers, fries and soda.  

People often eat foods that are high in

  • Saturated fats
  • Red meats
  • 'Empty' carbohydrates
  • Junk Food

And low in

  • Fresh fruits and vegetables
  • Whole Grains
  • Seafood 
  • Poultry 

Health effects have been linked to things such as hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, colorectal cancer and dementia. 

The team whose findings are published in a set of papers in Nature Genetics and Nature Communications are hopeful the same will happen in humans.

Prostate tumors tend to be so slow-growing and self-contained many patients die with it instead of from it.

But for those whose disease 'metastasizes' or spreads it is often fatal - and the typical Western diet is a key driver. 

First author research fellow Dr Ming Chen in Professor Pandolfi's lab said: 'Although it's widely postulated a Western diet can promote prostate cancer progression, direct evidence supporting a strong association between dietary lipids and prostate cancer has been lacking.'

The researchers discovered a link between genes and the environment in the spread of prostate cancer for the first time.

Cancer death rates are much higher in the US, UK and other western countries than in nations where lower fat diets are more common.

Prostate cancer affects about ten per cent of men in Asia - but that rate climbs to about 40 percent when they immigrate to the US, mirroring the rates among the native born population.

Professor Pandolfi, director of the Cancer Center and Cancer Research Institute, said that points to an environmental culprit that may work in concert with genetic factors to drive this aggressive, fatal disease. 

'The progression of cancer to the metastatic stage represents a pivotal event that influences patient outcomes and the therapeutic options available to patients,' he explained.

'Our data provide a strong genetic foundation for the mechanisms underlying metastatic progression, and we also demonstrated how environmental factors can boost these mechanisms to promote progression from primary to advanced metastatic cancer.'

Professor Pandolfi said studies have shown two genes that suppress tumors - PTEN and PML - are often lost in cases of prostate tumors that spread. About a fifth lack both.

When they compared genetic data on localized tumors lacking only the PTEN gene and metastatic ones without both the researchers found the latter produced huge amounts of lipids, or fats.

In tumors that lacked both PTEN and PML the cells' fat-production machinery was running amok.

Professor Pandolfi also pointed the normal mouse food - a vegetable-based chow which is essentially a low-fat vegan diet - bears little resemblance to that of the average American male.

When his team increased the levels of saturated fats - the kind found in fast food cheeseburgers and fries - in the animals' diet the mice developed aggressive, metastatic tumors.

It solved a long-standing scientific puzzle.

For years, researchers had difficulty modelling metastatic prostate cancer in mice, making it hard to study the disease in the lab.

The findings could result in more accurate and predictive mouse models for metastatic prostate cancer, which in turn could accelerate discovery of better therapies for the disease.

Additionally, physicians could soon be able to screen their early-stage prostate cancer patients for those whose tumors lack both PTEN and PML tumor suppressing genes, putting them at increased risk for progressing to metastatic disease.

These patients may be helped by starving these tumors of fat either with the fat-blocking drug or through diet.

Professor Pandolfi said: 'The data are tremendously actionable, and they surely will convince you to change your lifestyle.'

His findings follow previous research by other US scientists that found prostate cancer patients eating typically Western diets were two-and-a-half times more likely to succumb to the disease.

They analyzed health and diet data on 926 men diagnosed with prostate cancer who were followed for an average of 14 years.

Each year around 41,000 men in the UK are diagnosed with prostate cancer, and 11,000 men die from the disease.

In the US those figures are 209,292 and 27,970 respectively.  

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