Researchers at The Wistar Institute have discovered that ovarian cancer cells surviving chemotherapy release fructose as a signaling molecule, prompting neighboring cancer cells to loosen and spread. This metastatic process accounts for roughly 90% of ovarian cancer deaths. The study also found that high dietary fructose — comparable to levels in sugary drinks — can encourage cancer spread even without chemotherapy. Published in Nature Aging, the preclinical findings raise important questions about how diet influences cancer progression. While no patient trials have confirmed whether reducing fructose intake improves outcomes, the research points to nutrition as an underexplored factor in cancer recurrence and suggests that dietary fructose reduction could be a modifiable risk factor worth investigating.
