This study shows that initial weight loss, cancer type, appetite loss and COPD are significant and independent predictors of cachexia in patients with incurable cancer. Based on this, we identify five levels of risk of cachexia development.
The cachexia definition is based mainly on weight loss, and thus, initial minor weight loss below the assigned criteria [9] have been considered indicative of pre-cachexia in several studies [10,11,12]. The present study confirms that there is an increased risk of further weight loss and eventual development of cachexia when minor weight loss is present. However, the present study also identifies several other risk factors that predict cachexia, independently of weight loss. Among these is cancer type, which has been associated with, and assumed to predict cachexia [14]. The findings of the present study confirm this and demonstrate that a classification of cancer type into low risk cancer (breast cancer and hematologic cancers), high risk cancer (pancreatic and gastric tumours) and neutral risk cancer (all other cancers) significantly predicts cachexia development. However, findings from the CART analysis show that when weight loss is 3% or more, cancer type does not add further to the risk of cachexia development. Contrary to cancer type, cancer stage (localized vs. metastatic) was not shown to predict cachexia significantly, although a trend was noted in the univariable analysis. The study is not suitable to draw conclusions about cancer stage, however, since the majority of the study population (87%) had metastatic cancer.
Appetite loss is central in the cachexia pathophysiology. It is believed that mediators of cachexia affect the hypothalamus in such a way that the central drive to eat weakens [20]. In turn, this might contribute to an accelerated weight loss through lowered dietary intake. However, conscious control of eating may sometimes prevail over appetite loss [21], and the present study therefore examines both appetite loss and food intake as possible predictors of cachexia. Appetite loss is shown to predict cachexia development independently and appears to be especially important in predicting cachexia in patients with little weight loss (< 3%) and low or neutral risk cancer. Food intake did not independently predict cachexia development, however, and reasons for this might be collinearity (correlation coefficient 0.53) with appetite loss and/or inadequate estimation of food intake.
Patients with COPD had an increased risk of developing cachexia. And although a sensitivity analysis showed that this was partly due to collinearity with lung cancer (which was not explicitly adjusted for in the main analysis), there was still a clear trend towards increased risk of cachexia development. This might be because COPD, as many other chronic diseases, sometimes leads to cachexia. A conservative estimate of the prevalence of cachexia in COPD is 5% [22]. COPD might therefore impose an extra risk of cachexia development on patients with cancer. However, in the subsequent CART-analysis, COPD did not significantly discriminate between groups of patients in terms of cachexia risk, indicating that its role as a risk factor is inferior to the other three significant factors. Notably, heart disease, renal disease and arthritis did not predict cachexia development, although also these conditions are associated with cachexia [22].
Measurements of physical performance applied in the present study (the Karnofsky scale and the physical function scale of the EORTC QLQ C15 PAL) did not predict cachexia development, independently. Analysis of collinearity showed a moderate correlation between Karnofsky and physical function (correlation coefficient 0.54), and collinearity can sometimes explain why two variables that otherwise would be significant, both end up non-significant when present together in a multivariable model. However, this did most likely not explain the lack of significant contribution to the model in the present study as the backward selection in the multivariable analysis ensured that the least significant of the two predictors were rejected from the model before the other. Impaired physical performance is partly caused by the progressive loss of muscle mass that accompanies cachexia [23], and is considered a late symptom [9]. This might be a more likely explanation of why markers of physical performance did not predict cachexia.
Implications for clinical practice and future research
The present study demonstrates that information on cancer type, appetite loss and COPD improves accuracy of cachexia prediction when added to the established cachexia classifier, weight loss. This is especially true in patients with no or minimal weight loss (< 3%), whereas in patients with weight loss between 3 and 5%, development of cachexia is imminent, regardless of other factors. Based on these predictors, patients can be stratified into five different risk-levels of cachexia development. Cachexia development is not likely if in Risk-level 1, and conversely, for patients in Risk-level 3 or greater the risk of cachexia development is high. As such, the risk-levels enable the clinician to select which patients must be followed more closely with respect to cachexia development and ensure early adequate therapeutic intervention. To the researcher, this could improve patient selection in intervention trials aiming at preventing cachexia, by including only patients at risk of developing cachexia.
No single cut-off in this five-level risk ladder has both high sensitivity and high specificity of predicting cachexia. Thus, no single criterion was identified that accurately diagnosed pre-cachexia. Future research should attempt to improve prediction of cachexia development, and thereby improve the diagnosis of pre-cachexia. A likely path towards this aim is to examine the role of inflammatory markers in predicting cancer cachexia. Inflammation is a central part of cachexia pathophysiology and considered a driver of cachexia development [2], and it is likely that markers of systemic inflammation would improve accuracy of cancer cachexia prediction. Thus, the addition of inflammatory markers to the predictors identified in the present study is a necessary next step towards diagnosing pre-cachexia.
Appraisal of study design
The strength of this study is that it examines factors related to cachexia development in a large longitudinal cohort of patients, and thus enables the identification of factors that predict cachexia development and their relative importance. As is common in many studies in palliative care, the number of missing follow-up observations was relatively high. It is likely that a worsening in physical condition is among the reasons for patients dropping out, and this would decrease statistical power and may introduce a bias. To mitigate this effect, Cox proportional hazards method was used to let each patient contribute with his or her time on the study. Furthermore, to increase power of statistical analysis, patients with insufficient data at baseline, but with sufficient data at first follow-up visit were included with the latest visit as baseline. This was considered appropriate due to the open study design, which allowed inclusion of patients at any time point in their disease trajectory. The CART method is a data mining procedure that is simple to understand and gives an intuitive result. As the calibration plot (Fig. 4) shows, the resulting risk-level model fit the observed risk very well. This is expected when evaluating the model on data from which the model was developed, and the CART methodology may be criticised for creating models that are overfitted to the data, and thus reduce the external validity. By only including significant factors from the Cox model, the risk of overfitting is reduced, and, in addition, the resulting CART model seems clinically plausible. No objective measurements of body composition were available when assessing cachexia. Effect on weight change by accumulation of third space fluids or shifts between fat and muscle mass could therefore not be assessed. However, the adapted definition used in this study has previously been validated [10], and it could be argued that this definition is of greater clinical practical value as objective measures of body composition not always are available in the clinical setting. As mentioned above, no markers of systemic inflammation were assessed as possible predictors of cachexia development. Although the EPCCS study allowed for registration of incidental C-reactive protein measurements performed within 3 days before inclusion, too few observations were available to enable statistical inferences.