Asparagine is a derived amino acid found in a range of foods, including asparagus, fish, and potatoes. A new study reveals that Asparagine is linked to deadly breast cancer form.
Triple-negative breast cancer is one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer and is able to spread in the body very quickly. It’s a very resistant form of cancer to treatments like chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
The study on the Asparagine
A new research conducted by several prestigious institutions, including Cancer Research UK, has attempted to discover some of the reasons why this type of cancer not only is unresponsive to treatment but also spreads so quickly throughout the body, hoping to achieve more effective therapeutic approaches.
Following this study, its authors, professors Greg Hannon and Simon Knott and their teams found that the most important nutrient that facilitates the spread of this type of cancer is the Asparagine.
Asparagine is a non-essential amino acid synthesized by the body from several foods we eat frequently.
This study investigated whether limiting Asparagine levels in the body may slow the growth of tumors. The results of this study add to the number of pieces of evidence that diet can influence the course of the disease.
Tumors develop because of the Asparagine
When the amount of Asparagine in the body was reduced, the researchers noticed only a minor positive impact on the primary tumor, the one in the breast, but the tumor cells reduced their ability to metastasize to other areas of the body.
On the other hand, when scientists fed lab mice with food with high Asparagine content, it was observed that tumors spread with greater rapidity.
As a next step in the study, researchers are interested in conducting a clinical study on healthy patients hoping to understand how the diet affects the Asparagine level in the body. If this experiment is successful, researchers will recruit cancer patients for the next phase of the clinical trial.
In the meantime, Asparagine is linked to a deadly breast cancer form and we should limit its consumption.
