Grant: Project Grant

Breast cancer (BC) is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in women. Early stage BC survival has improved by 48% in the last three decades in Canada. However, life expectancy is still significantly reduced and BC survivors are now more likely to die from non-cancer causes, such as cardiovascular diseases related to obesity and poor fitness. We have preliminary results that show how bad fat pools in specific locations are strongly linked to worse health in BC survivors and that these fat pools can grow rapidly over the course of cancer therapy. The fat marbled around your stomach and other organs (e.g. liver) and within your muscles are examples of bad fat pools. The first goal of our proposed program is to measure the amount and changes in all the different fat pools, from the time of cancer diagnosis, throughout therapy and for several years afterwards. We will also measure the changes in metabolic health (e.g. blood sugars, insulin) and fitness (e.g exercise test on a bike) over these same times points. This will allow us to determine how changes in fat composition are related to changes in metabolic health and fitness. Our second goal is to test if a diet intervention called time restricted eating will slow the growth of these bad fat pools in BC patients over the course of therapy, resulting in better cardiovascular health following their BC treatment. We expect our study to show that monitoring of body fat composition should be part of BC care and that diet control should be a central component of BC therapy to improve health in survival.