Potential new treatment may help alleviate cancer-related illness

Cancer-related fatigue (CRF) is a serious but all-too-common illness that impairs patients' quality of life while they are undergoing therapy. As of right now, there are no effective pharmacological treatments for the collection of symptoms that make up CRF.
Researchers at Yale School of Medicine's Yale Cancer Centre discovered in a recent study that the metabolism-targeting medication dichloroacetate (DCA) benefited animals with CRF without interfering with cancer treatments. The results pave the way for future CRF study that might ultimately result in a brand-new patient therapy.
Senior author Rachel Perry, who is a member of Yale Cancer Center, said, "This study identifies dichloroacetate, an activator of glucose oxidation, as the first intervention, and particularly the first metabolism-focused intervention, to prevent the whole syndrome of cancer-related fatigue in preclinical models."
The evidence points to a number of beneficial outcomes of DCA treatment, including a decrease in oxidative stress in the muscle tissue of tumor-bearing mice. When administered as an adjuvant medication to treat cancer-related fatigue, the researchers claimed DCA could one day revolutionise practise.
"We hope that this research will provide the bedrock for future clinical trials using dichloroacetate -- an FDA-approved drug for another indication (lactic acidosis) -- to treat the debilitating syndrome of cancer-related fatigue," said Perry, who is also an assistant professor of medicine (endocrinology) and of cellular and molecular physiology at Yale School of Medicine.