Question: how far away do you think the cure for Cachexia is.

This is a really tough question!

If a patient with cancer cachexia has all of their cancer removed, they will usually stop losing weight within a few months. Unfortunately, this isn’t always possible, so we have to find other ways to stop cachexia.

Cachexia is really complex, with lots of different things joining together to make the condition. For example, there are lots of ways that your body can break down muscle. If you stop one of them, another might be able to take over its job and keep breaking it down. It’s a bit like being on an island, with lots of bridges to get to the mainland: if you are riding along, and you find a bridge has been washed away, you can go back, and take another bridge to get across. The body does the same thing. So, if you want to cure cachexia, you have to hit the problem in lots of different places. You have to block all of the bridges!

There have been some medicines that have helped people with cachexia. Some make people want to eat more (appetite stimulants), or helps to make more muscle (steroids). Some help stop the signals that are telling the body to break down muscle (Antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, and enzyme inhibitors, to name a few). We have to use a combination of different medicines to treat all the different problems, and it is a case of finding the right balance. Recently, there have been some very successful tests, which have slowed down the muscle loss, and helped patients feel better. But unfortunately, while they work for some people, they don’t work for everyone, so we have to keep looking for different treatments for these people.

So the short answer? We really don’t know, but the more we learn about all the ways the body acts in cachexia, the closer we come to finding a treatment that will work for more people.