Desai Sethi Urology Institute Launches Comparative Study on Diet and Prostate Cancer
Summary
- Dr. Nima Sharifi and Dr. Sanoj Punnen of Desai Sethi Urology Institute are co-leading a study looking into how specific diets affect both men at risk for prostate cancer and those who have already been diagnosed with the disease.
- The research team will compare the effects of a low-fat diet versus a low-carbohydrate diet on both benign and cancerous prostatic tissue.
- The study will monitor the dietary impacts on men with a diagnosis of localized prostate cancer who are about to undergo radical prostatectomy surgery.
A team from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine has begun a study of how diet may affect the development and treatment of prostate cancer.
Co-led by Nima Sharifi, M.D., and Sanoj Punnen, M.D., of the Miller School’s Desai Sethi Urology Institute, the study could shed light on how specific diets affect both men at risk for prostate cancer and those who have already been diagnosed with the disease. It could also offer a path to offset the more pernicious side effects of the standard treatment for prostate cancer.
“Men always ask me if there are any lifestyle or dietary changes they can make that could improve their outcomes, and while I believe those changes truly have an impact, it is hard to quantify just how much that impact is,” said Dr. Punnen, a Miller School professor of urologic oncology and associate professor and vice chair of research at Desai Sethi Urology Institute.
The study was developed partly in response to the need for more individual-level studies of prostate cancer prevention and treatment. Population-level data on prostate cancer includes hundreds of thousands of patients. But this type of data makes it difficult to draw clear connections between cancer development and patient-reported dietary information.
“Men are on all kinds of different diets, and so we’re desperate to understand what diets really do to the tumor, or to tissue that’s at a risk for becoming tumors,” said Dr. Sharifi, scientific director at Desai Sethi Urology Institute. “This study is a human-level intervention to figure out the nuts and bolts of how diets interact with the tumor.”
Diet and the Prostate
In the study, the research team will compare the effects of a low-fat diet versus a low-carbohydrate diet on both benign and cancerous prostatic tissue, a focus that comes partly from shifting dietary recommendations of recent years.
“It used to be that everybody thought fat was bad. And now maybe it’s carbohydrates and sugars that are really bad in terms of cardiovascular risk and things that affect metabolism,” said Dr. Sharifi. “But we really don’t understand what any of these things do to normal prostatic tissue that’s at risk for developing prostate cancer, or even to prostate cancer itself.”
The study will enroll men with a diagnosis of localized prostate cancer who are about to undergo radical prostatectomy surgery. For the normal two-week window between diagnosis and surgery, study participants will be given a rigorously prepared low-fat or low-carbohydrate diet. Then researchers will compare the effects of that diet on the surgically removed benign and cancerous prostatic tissue.
“By getting prostate tissue back to the investigators after the dietary intervention, we can evaluate the impact of the diet on the cancer at the tissue level and learn more about the mechanisms through which these interventions work,” Dr. Punnen said.
Impact on Prostate Cancer Treatment Effects
In addition to ascertaining the effects of diet as it relates to prostate cancer, Dr. Sharifi hopes that dietary interventions may help to mitigate some of the issues with conventional treatment for prostate cancer.
For men with advanced stages of prostate cancer, the standard of care is hormonal therapy in the form of testosterone deprivation. But testosterone deprivation comes with the risk of serious metabolic consequences, including an increase in fat and the loss of muscle and bone mass. Dietary interventions may be able to alleviate some of the hormonal therapy side effects as well as issues from the cancer itself.
Once researchers can gauge the effects of different types of diets, the path will be cleared to study how diets might be modified to reduce risks or improve treatment outcomes. Dr. Sharifi hopes the study may eventually lead to dietary recommendations for men at risk for prostate cancer and those who have been diagnosed with the disease.
“I think having good, rigorous studies that really look at the specifics of what diet does to the cell in humans is critical. Animal studies are very important, but ultimately what we really want to know is what it does to the human condition. And that’s what we’re doing,” he said.
Tags: Desai Sethi Urology Institute, Dr. Nima Sharifi, Dr. Sanoj Punnen, lifestyle medicine, low-fat diet, nutrition, prostate cancer