The Role of Obesity in Fractional Order Tumor-Immune Model

Abstract

This work investigates the tumor-obesity model via a fractional operator to analyze the interactions between cancer and obesity, since fractional derivatives capture the long formation of cancerous tumor cells that might takes years to develop. It is known that fat cells enhance the development of cancerous tumor cells. To examine how the immune system is influenced due to fat cells, interactions of four types of cell population, namely tumor cells, immune cells, normal cells and fat cells are examined. We investigate the equilibrium points and discuss their stability analytically. Numerical simulations are carried out to verify the analytical results, demonstrating that a low fat diet results in a smaller tumor burden as compared to a high-caloric diet.