Cachexia affects many patients with advanced cancer. It causes excessive weight loss, severe fatigue, and diminishes quality of life. Now, new research has found that patients with severe cancer-related fatigue also have less muscle mass and strength compared with patients who are less impaired.
“Ours is the first study to identify the relationship between chronic fatigue and muscle mass and strength in this special patient population,” says first author Robert Kilgour, professor and chair of Concordia University’s Department of Exercise Science.
The study involved an assessment of the fatigue levels, muscle mass, and strength of 84 patients with newly diagnosed and inoperable gastrointestinal or lung cancer. Researchers determined handgrip and quadricep strength through the use of muscle strength tests. Skeletal muscle mass was calculated using x-rays. A “brief fatigue inventory,” which was positively associated with body mass, weight loss, anemia, activity level, pain, and depression was then used as a comparison to the patients’ strength test results.
The outcomes, published in the Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle, suggest that the greater the level of cancer-related fatigue, the lower the level of muscle mass.
Kilgour hopes these results will lead to specialized strength or aerobics training programs in medical settings that will improve muscle mass among patients with cancer. “We could then look for changes in cancer-related fatigue and if those changes parallel alterations in muscle mass and strength,” he says.
“Although many cancer patients are in a palliative care situation, we want to maintain their quality of life as much as possible,” says coauthor Antonio Vigano, a palliative care physician at the McGill University Health Centre. “Participation would be high because activity gives patients control over their situation – control they feel they’ve lost. In addition we know there are other positive benefits to exercise, such as increased appetite.”
Source: Concordia University.
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