Wikipedia:RA Short Term Starvation

Cancer treatment strategies are associated with various side effects which range from being just uneasiness to as severe as developing as secondary tumors. There is growing evidence of research that alteration in the nutrients may selectively sensitize cancer cells to conventional cancer therapies while sparing the normal cells. Such diet alteration is also known to improve the immunosurveillance thereby leading to circumvention of immunosuppression, evasion of the immune response that can be stimulated through the modification of the patient’s microbiota. STS, ketogenic diets, etc. which are adjuvant dietary interventions not only affect the cancer cells' metabolic pathways but also its surrounding environment that is involved in cancer progression and also the resistance to cancer cell death.

Such dietary restrictions impair the aging process and the probability of age-related diseases such as cancer. It is seen that STS/ fasting are more effective than dietary restriction in order to halt cancer cell growth. This can be attributed to the starving cells which switch off the signals for development and reproduction and go into a protective mode. However, being mutated, cancer cells remain vulnerable to any stress as they are not sensitized to any external signaling. Hence, STS elicits a differential stress resistance mechanism as well as a response by setting adverse conditions for cancer cells but capacitating the normal cell survival. Nutrient signaling pathways linking growth hormone/insulin-like growth factor-1 axis and its downstream effectors, play a vital role in DSR in reaction to starvation regulating the other cell maintenance systems, like autophagy and apoptosis, that are cancer-associated.

Sadfie et al also reported such a phenomenon as differential stress resistance (DSR) and is based on the proposition that normal cells transform their metabolic state during STS, redistributing cellular energy from a reproduction/growth program to one of protection/maintenance. Conversely, cancer cells differentiated by constitutive commencement of proliferative pathways caused by mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes are insensitive to DSR. These diverse forms of food deprivation which include dietary restriction (DR) or calorie restriction (CR), may be severe or intermittent, fasting, and starvation. Compared to dietary control, short-term starvation is much more effective in protecting normal cells against chemotherapy drugs.