New Study on Fasting During Chemotherapy for Ovarian Cancer

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Let's talk about this study which looks at the effect of short-term fasting compared to a regular diet in patients with ovarian cancer. This was a pilot study meaning a very small study. They looked at patients who were receiving neoagant chemotherapy with carboplatin and plyaxel for a high-grade cirrus ovarian cancer. Half the group followed a short-term fasting diet starting with 36 hours before chemotherapy all the way through to 24 hours after each chemotherapy cycle. And then the other half received a or followed a free diet.

[00:00:36]The primary endpoint was the impact on insulin levels after three cycles of neoagiman chemotherapy and then secondary endpoints included oncologic outcomes. As you can see, it's a small study. They had 18 patients in each arm.

[00:00:49]Patients that were in the fasting group had no more than 350 calories per day during that fasting window. Again, 36 hours before all the way through 24 hours after chemotherapy, they had unrestricted water, herbal tea, limited vegetable juice, and a small amount of light vegetable broth. And what they found was that after neoaging chemotherapy, insulin levels increased in the normal diet arm, but decreased in the short-term fasting arm. They also showed that the patients who fasted had a better response at surgery after neoagiman chemotherapy and also had an improvement in progressionfree survival time without disease progression or death. It was 38 months in the fasting arm and 24 months in the free diet arm.

[00:01:34]Some of the proposed hypotheses are that fasting may make tumor cells more susceptible to destruction. The reduction in insulin levels can help impede tumor growth and progression. And there are other studies showing potential benefits of fasting during chemotherapy. But we certainly need more data. This is a very small pilot study, 18 patients in each arm, and we can't draw major conclusions about such a small study. But I think it really is an interesting signal, something that we should be talking about and I would love to see a larger trial looking at this in different tumor types. Fasting certainly is not easy and so although this is a lowcost intervention, we have to keep in mind that this is difficult for people to do. But I will tell you that I have had patients who have done fasting throughout chemotherapy and so it is something that I think we should be talking about. I'm going to do a larger substack on this study and then kind of all of the other fasting data that we have both during chemo and after in kind of a survivorship period for both breast and gan cancer. So stay tuned for that.

[00:02:41]But in the meantime, let me know all of the questions that you have so I can make sure I can address them. And then if you've done tried fasting, what was your experience?