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Cancer cells thrive on fructose, US study finds
Last Updated: 2010-08-02 19:46:52 -0400 (Reuters Health)August 3, 2010
Last Updated: 2010-08-02 19:46:52 -0400 (Reuters Health)By Maggie Fox
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Pancreatic tumor cells use fructose to divide and proliferate, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a study that challenges the common wisdom that all sugars are the same.
They said their finding, published August 1st in Cancer Research, may help explain other studies that have linked fructose intake with pancreatic cancer.
"These findings show that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation," Dr. Anthony Heaney of UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center and colleagues wrote.
"They have major significance for cancer patients given dietary refined fructose consumption, and indicate that efforts to reduce refined fructose intake or inhibit fructose-mediated actions may disrupt cancer growth."
The beverage industry has argued that sugar is sugar. Dr. Heaney said his team found otherwise. They grew pancreatic cancer cells in lab dishes and fed them both glucose and fructose.
Tumor cells fed glucose and fructose used the two sugars in two different ways, the team at the University of California Los Angeles found.
"In comparison with glucose, fructose induces thiamine-dependent transketolase flux and is preferentially metabolized via the nonoxidative pentose phosphate pathway to synthesize nucleic acids and increase uric acid production," they said.
"I think this paper has a lot of public health implications. Hopefully, at the federal level there will be some effort to step back on the amount of high fructose corn syrup in our diets," Dr. Heaney said in a statement.
Now the team hopes to develop a drug that might stop tumor cells from making use of fructose.
U.S. consumption of high fructose corn syrup went up 1,000% between 1970 and 1990, researchers reported in 2004 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
SOURCE: http://link.reuters.com/wet82n
Cancer Res 2010;70:6368-6376.
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