Open access
With interest we read the article entitled “Dietary Intake of Advanced Glycation End Products (AGEs) and Mortality among Individuals with Colorectal Cancer” by Veronika Fedirko et al. (Mao et al., 2021). We noted the association reported between advanced glycation end-products (AGEs) and mortality after colorectal cancer (CRC) diagnosis. In this article, dietary AGEs were estimated in 5801 CRC patients using a reference dietary AGE food composition database, which is based on three best characterized AGEs including the Nε-[carboxymethyl]lysine (CML), Nε-[1-carboxyethyl]lysine (CEL), and Nδ-[5-hydro-5-methyl-4-imidazolon-2-yl]-ornithine (MG-H1). They found no association of baseline dietary intake of AGEs with CRC-specific and all-cause mortality.
AGEs accumulate naturally with age in the body and are created when certain foods are cooked at high temperatures (Sarmah & Roy, 2022). Patients with high blood sugar levels have a high risk of producing too many AGEs (Hosseini et al., 2021). In this study, a positive association between AGEs and all-cause or CRC-specific mortality in patients without type II diabetes was found. One weakness of this study is that they consider only baseline AGEs rather than the evolution of change of AGEs. Patients’ dietary behavior was likely to be changed after the diagnosis of cancer. Additionally, medications such as corticosteroids can have an effect on the blood sugar levels in patients without a previous history of diabetes. Furthermore, we do not know if AGEs are directly or indirectly affected by the tumor cells or treatment. As AGEs can be detected in the human skin through AGE reader, which is non-invasive and feasible in the clinic it would be interesting to investigate the impact of the change of AGEs on mortality in CRC patients in further studies (Yavuz & Apaydin, 2021). Nonetheless, the clinical implication of this study is relatively limited as we cannot yet recommend adjusting patients’ food intake to reduce AGEs either in the prevention or treatment phase of cancer.
Availability of data and materials
Not applicable.
References
Hosseini MS, Razavi Z, Ehsani AH, Firooz A, Afazeli S. Clinical significance of non-invasive skin autofluorescence measurement in patients with diabetes: a systematic review and Meta-analysis. E Clin Med. 2021;42:101194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.101194.
Mao Z, Aglago EK, Zhao Z, Schalkwijk C, Jiao L, Freisling H, et al. Dietary intake of advanced glycation end products (AGEs) and mortality among individuals with colorectal cancer. Nutrients. 2021;13(12):4435.
Sarmah S, Roy AS. A review on prevention of glycation of proteins: potential therapeutic substances to mitigate the severity of diabetes complications. Int J Biol Macromol. 2022;195:565–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2021.12.041.
Yavuz DG, Apaydin T. Skin autofluorescence is associated with low bone mineral density in type 2 diabetic patients. J Clin Densitom. 2021;S1094-6950(21)00101-3. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jocd.2021.11.010.
Acknowledgements
Not applicable.
Funding
Not applicable.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Authors
Contributions
The author(s) read and approved the final manuscript.
Corresponding author
Correspondence to Lian Liu.
Ethics declarations
Ethics approval and consent to participate
Not applicable.
Consent for publication
Not applicable.
Competing interests
N. Erickson has received speaker honoraria from CSL Behring, Fresenius, Baxter, Janssen-Cilag GmbH, Nutricia and GHD. She served on the Expert Advisory Board at Baxter, received consulting fees from Fresenius, and received compensation for writing articles from Klarigo Verlag and Havas Lynx Group. None of these activities were related to the content of this article. Lian Liu declared no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
