A new study has shown that some women's breast cancer could greatly improve by changing their diet into a low-fat one; it seems that the restriction of calories can actually reduce the incidence of cancer, while higher caloric intake might lead to cancer development later on.

Cancer research has been one of medicine's top priorities for a long time, and there have been many studies regarding food intake and cancer in the past, but this one from Switzerland seems to be an important sum of all the ones that preceded it, shedding some new light on the subject.

According to the Web MD, the study showed that those women who changed their diet to a low-fat one in the early stages of their breast cancer could potentially greatly reduce the risk of early death by the disease. This was particularly so for those women that had estrogen receptor-negative (ER-negative) disease.

Furthermore, the women who besides ER-negative disease had also been diagnosed with progesterone-receptor negative (PR-negative) cancer had an even higher possibility of survival, increasingly reducing their death risk as the study went on, even reducing their death risk by 36 percent of dying of any cause at all in the following 15 years by following the diet for only five years.

The Chicago Tribune reports that the study included over 2,400 women between the ages of 48 and 79; about 1,600 of them had ER-positive cancers, while the others had ER-negative or ER- and PR-negative disease; among all of them, each and every one was in the early stages of the disease and received treatment between 1994 and 2001.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the research was presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium last week, and the subjects were volunteers for the Women's Intervention Nutrition Study going through different types of treatment for their illness, from hormone therapy to chemo and radiotherapy.