Chronic caloric restriction (CR) has powerful anticarcinogenic actions in both preclinical and clinical studies but may be difficult to sustain. As an alternative to CR, there has been growing interest in intermittent fasting (IF) in both the scientific and lay community as a result of promising study results, mainly in experimental animal models. According to a survey by the… Read More

BACKGROUND: Vitamin D plays pleiotropic roles in the body and hence, changes in its metabolism and distribution during starvation could play an important role in the adaptive response to famine. We aimed to identify the responses of some vitamin D metabolites to 8 d of fasting and exercise. METHODS: A repeated-measures design was implemented, in which 14 male volunteers fasted for 8 d and… Read More

PURPOSE: The prospective, randomized ERGO2 trial investigated the effect of calorie-restricted ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting (KD-IF) on re-irradiation for recurrent brain tumors. The study did not meet its primary endpoint of improved progression-free survival in comparison to standard diet (SD). We here report the results of the quality of life/neurocognition and a detailed analysis… Read More

BACKGROUND: States of chronic overnutrition and undernutrition are both associated with impaired bone health and increased fracture risk but there are no data on bone microarchitecture following short-term controlled nutritional challenges. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of our study was to evaluate the impact of short-term high-caloric feeding and fasting on bone microarchitecture. We hypothesized… Read More

Nutrition and exercise interventions are strongly recommended for most cancer patients; however, much debate exists about the best prescription. Combining fasting with exercise is relatively untouched within the oncology setting. Separately, fasting has demonstrated reductions in chemotherapy-related side effects and improved treatment tolerability and effectiveness. Emerging… Read More

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: The goal of this review was to provide an update on the literature examining how voluntary, temporary abstention from eating impacts cognitive function. RECENT FINDINGS: We evaluated peer-reviewed articles published between August 2013 and January 2021 that assessed adults, included a measure of cognitive functioning with neutral stimuli, and compared individuals in a fasted… Read More

ABSTRACT: Fasting has been frequently practiced for religious or medical purposes worldwide. However limited literature assesses the impact of different fasting patterns on the physiologic and cardiac-related parameters in patients with hypertension. This review aims to examine the effect of fasting on cardiovascular outcomes in hypertensive patients. Medline, Embase and Cochrane library were… Read More

BACKGROUND: Bone marrow adipose tissue (BMAT) plays a role in systemic energy metabolism and responds to nutritional changes. Chronic starvation as well as visceral adiposity are associated with BMAT accumulation. Two types of BMAT have been described which differ in anatomic location (proximal-regulated-rBMAT vs distal-constitutive-cBMAT) and composition (higher unsaturated lipids of cBMAT… Read More

Objective: As a protective response, during starvation organisms withdraw energy from growth and reproduction to focus on cellular maintenance. Cancer cells cannot undergo this differential response which has been theorized as an adjunct to improve both the effect of chemotherapy treatment and reduce treatment side effects. We sought to investigate the feasibility and effect of short-term… Read More

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Serotonergic and dopaminergic systems in the brain are essential for homeostatic and reward-associated regulation of food intake and systemic energy metabolism. It is largely unknown how fasting influences these systems or if such effects are altered in humans with obesity. We therefore aimed to evaluate the effects of fasting on hypothalamic/thalamic serotonin transporter… Read More