1544O - Comparison of Nutritional Assessment with a New Definition of Cachexia in Determining Outcomes of Advanced Cancer Patients

Abstract

ABSTRACT Background An international consensus statement providing a definition and diagnostic criteria for cancer cachexia was recently published. This study aimed to compare the relative prognostic utility of this definition with nutritional status as defined by the Patient-Generated Subjective Global Assessment (PG-SGA) tool. Methods A prospective cohort study was conducted in a tertiary hospital where chemotherapy naive patients with life expectancy ≥3 months were recruited by medical oncologists and a research dietitian. Kaplan-Meier survival analyses were used to determine the median survival of patients with advanced cancer in the cohort study, and a subset of patients who met the criteria for cancer cachexia as defined in the international consensus (Fearon 2011). The log rank chi-square test was used to evaluate the strength of predictors of overall survival (OS). A P value of Results The following table demonstrates the patient baseline characteristics of the two cohorts.Unlabelled TableCachexia (Met ≥1 criteria)Malnourished (PG-SGA B/C)Sample size80% (n= 62/78)58% (n= 66/114)Age, years, mean61 (SD 8.7)63 (SD 9.7)Male, % (n)63% (39)67% (44)% of weight loss in 6 months preceding, mean11.1 (SD 5.5)9.5 (SD 6.4)Estimated OS, mths, median (95% CI) Log rank test (Mantel-Cox)11.4 (5.5 – 17.3) 2.248.4 (4.06 – 12.69) 8.07 Sixty eight percent of the advanced cancer patients (53 of the 78) were both malnourished and met ≥1 of the proposed diagnostic criteria for cachexia at baseline. The log rank test from the Kaplan-Meier survival analysis demonstrated that nutritional status as defined by PG-SGA tool was a stronger overall predictor of OS than the recently defined criteria. Conclusions The concept of using the PG-SGA tool to identify potential patients with cachexia for future trials deserves further investigation given that malnutrition, as determined using this tool, had a better overall predictive value of cancer patients' survival than the proposed diagnostic criteria for cachexia. Disclosure All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.