Phase II Trial of the Effect of Gemcitabine With Intravenous Omega-3 Fish Oil Infusion in Patients With Unresectable Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma

Detailed 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.

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