A Study of the Effect of Gemcitabine With Fish Oil in Patients With Advanced Pancreatic Cancer
Status:
Completed
Trial end date:
2014-06-01
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
Over 7000 patients are diagnosed with pancreas cancer every year in the UK. Only 10% have it
caught early enough to have surgery to cure it. The rest at best can undergo chemotherapy to
extend survival, but current treatments offer at best an improvement of only a few months
compared to no treatment at all. In addition only about a quarter of patients will respond to
the treatment. In addition these patients often experience profound weight loss, loss of
appetite and energy primarily because of the cancer process itself. Our hypothesis is that
the addition of fish oil infusion to gemcitabine chemotherapy will result in an improved rate
of tumour response on CT imaging.
Fish oils, or specifically the omega-3 fatty acid component, appear to have a range of
powerful anti-cancer actions. This is supported by evidence from a wide range of sources,
from laboratory experiments to basic human studies. Although this evidence specifically
includes many pancreatic cancer studies in the laboratory it has not yet been confirmed in
human trials.
Contrary to conventional chemotherapy, fish oil is a naturally occuring non-toxic compound
and so is not associated with the side-effects of chemotherapy. In fact a number of clinical
studies have demonstrated significant improvements in quality of life for pancreas cancer
patients treated with fish oil, particularly with reference to improvements in appetite and
energy levels. This is of course in addition to the anti-cancer actions.