A study of patients with metastatic lung cancer by researchers based in Brazil and the United States has found that their performance in simple physical tests such as sitting down, standing and walking can help physicians arrive at a prognosis and approach to treatment. An article on the study is published in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation . The findings also included identification in the volunteers' blood plasma of two substances – serine and M22G – with the potential to become biomarkers capable of indicating which patients are most likely to respond to chemotherapy.
The study was supported by FAPESP (projects 16/20187-6 and 19/17009-7), and was conducted by researchers at the University of São Paulo's Medical School (FM-USP) in Brazil and Harvard Medical School in the US. As explained by Willian das Neves Silva, first author of the article, cachexia anorexia syndrome, characterized by loss of skeletal muscle mass due to intense consumption of muscular and fatty tissue, is a common feature of advanced-stage cancer and is usually associated with loss of appetite, fatigue, and muscle weakness. In the case of lung cancer, and specifically of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most frequent form of lung cancer, the study showed that measuring muscle mass is not sufficient for prognostic purposes and that muscle function should also be taken into account.
"We saw that function is more important. Not just having muscles, but what the patient can do wit.