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Comment by oneepic | Hacker News Reader

Coincidentally my mother has an 80yo neighbor who got diagnosed with brain+lung tumors a few weeks ago. I'd like to recommend this article to her. Though it apparently has the risk of dyslipidemia, "Abnormally elevated cholesterol or fats (lipids) in the blood."

(maybe some exercise too to help mitigate that risk)

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This study should not be used to make ANY medical decisions and is only useful in proposing additional studies. I would recommend against sharing it with anyone who is not trained to read and understand these results. Often laypersons will take these studies and make absurd claims based off of them that kill people.

Keep in mind that this is a study of a single person and the tumor reduction was insignificant compared to the 4CM reduction from radio/chemo therapies. There is no way to know if Keto even did anything without a larger cohort. For all we know, it made the cancer worse than it would have been.

You read the abstract wrong. The reduction was significant and more than from radiation and chemo (ed. for one of the tumors).

> Computed tomography following radiation and chemotherapy showed a reduction in the right frontal lobe lesion from 5.5 cm × 6.2 cm to 4 cm × 2.7 cm, while the mass in the upper-right lung lobe reduced from 6.0 cm × 3.0 cm to 2.0 × 1.8 cm. Two years after KD initiation and without any other therapeutic intervention, the right frontal lobe lesion calcified and decreased in size to 1.9 cm × 1.0 cm, while the size of the lung mass further decreased to 1.7 cm × 1.0 cm.

Formatting to make it a little easier to parse. There was only a reduction greater than a CM on the right side which almost seems to be just lagging the left side reduction from the Chemo. However without a larger number of participants there is no way to call any of it significant.

DIM ORG->CHM->KTD

RX: 5.5->4.0->1.9 RY: 6.2->2.7->1.0

LX: 6.0->2.0->1.7 LY: 3.0->1.8->1.0

Edit: Also keep in mind that we are talking about 2 dimensions.

For instance on the right side in cm^2: 34.1 -> 10.8 -> 1.9

And the left: 18-> 3.8 -> 1.7

It does look like it could be a lagging effect for the left side. But still, remission and even slight reduction in tumor size are all good signs. When you want to do every possible thing to reduce chances of it coming back (the second time is brutal for many cancers), I would absolutely recommend people to do this basically harmless diet.

Sure it's just one person but given the mechanics of not feeding sugar to tumors, it's a pretty easy recommendation to make.

You may very well be right, but this is how you kill people. You give medical advice based on single person studies and people run with it. For all we know, certain tumors could be supercharged by elevated ketones and it could keep the immune system from doing it's job. We need to the research to know for a fact.

If you want to risk it, that's fine. But medical misinformation kills people every single day. The fact is that we have no freaking idea if any of this is true without other information.

"For all we know"...sure. We already know most cancers use glucose. The problem is you are severely underestimating how dangerous cancers that come out of remission are and severely overestimating how dangerous this diet can be. Any kind of risk analysis would tell you to do this diet.

I understand that it's much more satisfying to make suppositions based on incomplete data than to say "I don't know." However, the fact of the matter is, we do not know one way or another.

A person is never really going to know anything for sure. It's all risk analysis.

At 80 I would be more worried about the tumors than elevated cholesterol / fats

Kinda too late by then. They've found cardiovascular disease in 20 y/os who die of other causes, e.g. car accidents. It's a lifelong process, so early prevention is key.

That’s my point. Go on the keto diet and fill up on saturated fats, throwing caution to the cardiovascular wind, if that has a chance of reducing the tumour growth or send it into remission.

Ah, I didn't read closely enough x_x

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