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Abstract

An immune-modulating diet (IMD), an enteral diet enriched with immunonutrition and whey-hydrolyzed peptides, has been shown to bring an improvement of prognosis by suppressing inflammation after surgery or under stress. In this study, we have experimentally and clinically examined the effect of the IMD in cancer chemotherapy. In experiments using colorectal cancer cell-transplanted mice, the mice fed with the IMD in combination with anti-cancer agent showed significantly to maintain their body weight excluding tumor, and to reduce plasma interleukin-6 (IL-6) levels compared with the control group. Furthermore, normal mice fed with the IMD elevated the level of plasma ghrelin, in particular acyl ghrelin. An clinical trial for a patient with malignant lymphoma revealed that the acyl/desacyl ghrelin ratio and total calorie intake was increased when the patient was supplemented with the IMD in conjunction with chemotherapy. These results suggested that the supplementation of the IMD during cancer chemotherapy might enable to maintain the food intake of the patients through elevating their acyl ghrelin levels.