Cancer is one of the most frequent causes of worldwide death and morbidity and is a major public health problem. Although, there are several widely used treatment methods including chemo-, immune- and radiotherapies, these mostly lack sufficient efficiency and induce toxicities in normal surrounding tissues. Thus, finding new approaches to mitigate side effects and potentially accelerate treatment is paramount. In line with this, increasing preclinical evidence indicates that caloric restriction (CR) and fasting might have anticancer effects by reducing tumor progression, enhancing death of cancer cells, and elevating the effectiveness and tolerability of chemo- and radiotherapies. Nonetheless, clinical studies assessing the potential of CR and fasting in cancer are scarce and inconsistent, and more investigations are still required to clarify their effect in different aspects of cancer treatment. In this review, we have summarized the findings of preclinical and clinical studies of CR and fasting with respect to efficacy and on the adverse effects of standard cancer treatments.

癌症是世界范围内最常见的死亡和发病原因之一，也是一个主要的公共卫生问题。尽管有几种广泛使用的治疗方法，包括化学疗法、免疫疗法和放射疗法，但这些方法大多缺乏足够的效率并在正常周围组织中引起毒性。因此，寻找新的方法来减轻副作用并可能加速治疗至关重要。与此一致，越来越多的临床前证据表明，热量限制 (CR) 和禁食可能通过减少肿瘤进展、增强癌细胞死亡以及提高化疗和放疗的有效性和耐受性来产生抗癌作用。尽管如此，评估 CR 和禁食在癌症中的潜力的临床研究很少且不一致，还需要更多的研究来阐明它们在癌症治疗不同方面的作用。在这篇综述中，我们总结了 CR 和禁食在疗效和标准癌症治疗的副作用方面的临床前和临床研究结果。