冰激凌能缓解化疗副作用?

癌症患者接受化疗时常出现腹泻、贫血、体重减轻和免疫功能下降等副作用。为了缓解和应对这些副作用，新西兰一家乳业企业和奥克兰大学联合研制出一款冰淇淋产品，其中的两种活性成分会显著减轻副作用，如体重减轻和肠壁破坏，患者在免疫系统和造血功能上也有明显改善。如今这款口感好、外形漂亮还附有药效的草莓味冰激凌为广大的癌症患者带来了福音。

Researchers in New Zealand have developed an ice cream formula that they believe could alleviate some of the side effects of chemotherapy such as diarrhea and white blood cell loss.

The product, known as Recharge, is a strawberry-flavored ice cream created by scientists at LactoPharma, a joint venture between dairy giant Fonterra and the University of Auckland.

Associate Professor Geoff Krissansen from the University of Auckland's School of Medical Sciences is part of the LactoPharma research team. He says the side effects of chemotherapy treatments can have serious consequences.

"These drugs cause diarrhea and white blood cell loss, exposing people to infection. And this diarrhea and loss of white blood cell count can be life-threatening and can delay therapy."

Lactoferrin, a protein in milk, is recognized as being beneficial to patients undergoing immune-suppression-suppression of the immune system. Researchers have found that an iron-saturated version has been particularly effective for patients undergoing chemotherapy.

They also discovered new properties of milk fats that can inhibit gut damage and improve white and red blood cell counts.

Krissansen says Recharge ice cream was developed from a combination of these two active ingredients.

"We sort of then had the hypothesis that maybe if you combine both of these two bioactives, and we combined them into a product that we called Recharge, and we called it Recharge, because we thought it would recharge a person's body to be able to withstand the chemotherapy. And when that was trialed, that was even more effective than the two compounds, the two bioactive by themselves. And that's how I guess the Recharge was developed."

Having identified potentially effective dairy ingredients, scientists decided to develop an ice cream in the hope that it would preserve the product's bioactivity through its frozen formula and allow it to be stored for long periods of time.

But they faced the challenge of turning the recipe into an ice cream without compromising its beneficial properties.

They worked with Fonterra-owned ice cream manufacturer Tip Top to find a method that would safeguard the formula during production.

Dr. Jeremy Hill is Fonterra's Chief Technology Officer.

"Ice cream normally undergoes a heating step during its manufacture, pasteurization, and pasteurization would have inactivated the dairy ingredients that we had enriched to add to it with the particular properties. So we had to come up with a new way of manufacturing the ice cream in order to incorporate those active ingredients, and in fact had to do quite a substantial number of trials to actually come up with this new process for manufacturing the Recharge ice cream."

Mike Findlay is the Director of Cancer Trials New Zealand based at the University of Auckland's School of Medical Sciences.

He says that while dietary management plays an important role in cancer treatment, this is the first time that a food product has been developed with possible benefits for chemotherapy patients.

"In people who have particularly advanced cancer, nutrition, just basic nutrition, is a problem. Often the energy is being sucked away by the cancer, so keeping up with a true nutritional requirement is a problem. So food is largely to do with keeping up with energy requirements. There's not a lot of good research around about foods being developed for therapeutic purposes to help with cancer or to help ameliorate the side effects of cancer treatments."

For CRI, I am Li Dong.