Defining and classifying cancer cachexia: a proposal by the SCRINIO Working Group

Although cancer cachexia is widely diffuse in the cancer patient population, there is no objective definition and classification of this syndrome. The purpose of this study is to propose a simple and quick classification that relies on the severity of the body weight loss and presence/absence of symptoms that are associated with cancer cachexia.

The authors used a database of an ongoing multicenter prospective investigation on the screening of the nutrition risk of 1307 cancer outpatients from different (mainly Italian) university or scientific institutes or hospitals. The database included demographic, oncologic, clinical, and nutrition data. The patients were divided into 4 classes based on combinations of body weight loss (< 10%, precachexia; > or = 10%, cachexia) and the presence/absence of at least 1 symptom of anorexia, fatigue, or early satiation. The authors verified statistically whether these 4 classes were associated with the distribution of main clinical, nutrition, and oncologic variables, after adjustment for treatment status, by using the Cochrane-Mantel-Hanszel test for count data and ANOVA for continuous data.

Moving from "asymptomatic precachexia" (class 1) to "symptomatic cachexia" (class 4), there were statistically significant trends (P < .0001) in the percentage of gastrointestinal vs nongastrointestinal tumors, severity of cancer stage, percentage of weight loss, number of symptoms per patient, Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) performance status, and nutritional risk score.

The statistical analysis has validated the classification by identifying stages with different severity of cachexia. This classification could be adopted within a comprehensive oncologic approach to the weight-losing patients, until more specific diagnostic techniques are available in clinical practice.