Question: what type of cancer do you study and how many lives are being affected by it each year?

I don’t study a particular type of cancer, but rather something that people with cancer develop. People with all different types of cancer may develop cachexia, though it seems to be most serious in people with tumours of the gastrointestinal tract (especially pancreas, colon, bowel), head or neck cancers, and in a type of lung cancer called non-small cell lung cancer.

About half of all people with cancer will develop cachexia, so it is a very serious problem when you think that one in three Australians will develop cancer at some point in their life. It is even more common in some types of cancer, with about 86% of patients with pancreatic cancer losing muscle and fat to cachexia, but there are also some types of cancer that rarely develop cachexia, like skin cancers.

One problem is that we don’t know exactly how many people develop cachexia. Despite being such a common and serious problem, many people think that it is just part of the cancer, or because of chemotherapy, and don’t think of it as separate condition. We call this underdiagnosing or underreporting, because it is not being recorded that people have cachexia. This is why talking to doctors, patients, families, and even people who don’t have cancer is so important, so that we can let people know that it is a big problem, and that we are working on ways of fixing it!