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Episode 343: Cancer Cachexia Considerations for Nurses and Patients

Release Date: 12/27/2024

Episode 344: ONS 50th Anniversary: Founding Leaders’ Vision and Challenges, Then and Now

The ONS Podcast

“Who would think that we would be here 50 years later? And with the excitement that I think will build even more, I’m so humbled and honored to talk to young nurses. And their excitement—the same excitement that we had in the very beginning—is inherent. I hope that our legacy will be that we are able to pass on this tremendous gift of our careers to new nurses,” Cindi Cantril, MPH, RN, OCN®-Emeritus, founding ONS member and first vice president, told Darcy Burbage, DNP, RN, AOCN®, CBCN®, chair of the ONS 50th Anniversary Committee, during a conversation about the history of...

Episode 343: Cancer Cachexia Considerations for Nurses and Patients

The ONS Podcast

“There’s actually quite a bit of debate about what the clinical definition of cancer cachexia is, but in its simplest definition of cachexia in this case is cancer-induced body weight loss. You can have cachexia in other diseases, for heart failure or renal failure, but it's basically tumor-induced metabolic derangement that leads to inflammation and often anorexia, which produces body weight loss,” Teresa Zimmers, PhD, told Jaime Weimer, MSN, RN, AGCNS-BS, AOCNS®, manager of oncology nursing practice at ONS, during a conversation about cancer cachexia. Music Credit: “” by Kevin...

Episode 342: What It’s Like to Serve on the Leadership Development Committee

The ONS Podcast

“The Leadership Development Committee (LDC) is one of the most important member volunteer positions in the organization, and here’s why: The main purpose of the LDC is to recruit, vet, and select ONS Board of Directors. As some of you may know, it has been three years since we moved away from members voting for directors,” ONS member Nancy Houlihan, MA, RN, AOCN®, 2020–2022 ONS president and former director of nursing practice at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, NY, told Jaime Weimer, MSN, RN, AGCNS-BS, AOCNS®, manager of oncology nursing practice at ONS, during a...

Episode 341: Pharmacology 101: HER Inhibitors

The ONS Podcast

“Key thing here is that it was discovered that when you have gene amplification of HER2 you get a resultant overexpression of that HER protein and that overexpression leads to a driver for certain cancers. So, when you have an overexpression of HER2, it leads to the cancer being more aggressive,” ONS member Rowena “Moe” Schwartz, PharmD, BCOP, FHOP, told Jaime Weimer, MSN, RN, AGCNS-BS, AOCNS®, manager of oncology nursing practice at ONS, during a conversation about HER inhibitors. Music Credit: “” by Kevin MacLeod Licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution...

Episode 340: What It’s Like to Plan an ONS Conference

The ONS Podcast

“Don’t be afraid of applying, even if you’ve never planned a conference before, and you think, ‘Well, I have no idea what I’m doing.’ You probably know more than you think you do. You probably have more connections than you think you do, and it is such a worthwhile experience,” Colleen Erb, MSN, CRNP, ACNP-BC, AOCNP®, hematology and oncology nurse practitioner at Jefferson Health Asplundh Cancer Pavilion in Willow Grove, PA, told Lenise Taylor, MN, RN, AOCNS®, BMTCN®, conferences oncology clinical specialist at ONS, during a conversation about serving on a planning committee...

Episode 339: A Lesson on Labs: How to Monitor and Educate Patients With Cancer

The ONS Podcast

“The nurse’s role in monitoring the lab values really depends on the clinics you're working at, but really when our patients are receiving treatment, especially in the infusion center, the nurses should be looking at those lab values prior to treatment being started,” Clara Beaver, DNP, RN, AOCNS®, ACNS-BC, clinical nurse specialist at Karmanos Cancer Center in Michigan told Jaime Weimer, MSN, RN, AGCNS-BS, AOCNS®, manager of oncology nursing practice at ONS during a conversation about how to monitor and educate patients with cancer. Music Credit: “” by Kevin MacLeod  ...

Episode 338: High-Volume Subcutaneous Injections: The Oncology Nurse’s Role

The ONS Podcast

“Although the patient is spending a little less time in the clinic, the administration actually requires the nurse to be at the chairside the entire time. This has allowed nurses to spend potentially uninterrupted time to sit and converse with the patients that they may not have had with an IV infusion. It’s been a wonderful unintentional outcome from the development of the large-volume subcutaneous injections,” Crystal Derosier, MSN, RN, OCN®, clinical specialist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in Boston, MA, told Jaime Weimer, MSN, RN, AGCNS-BS, AOCNS®, manager of oncology nursing...

Episode 337: Meet the ONS Board of Directors: Haynes, Wilson, and Yackzan

The ONS Podcast

“The gravity of the responsibility was realized when you walked into the boardroom and you’re there to make decisions, and the perspective you have to take shifts. Of course, I bring to the table my expertise and my perspective, but the decision-making and strategy behind it is really geared at sustaining the organization and moving us towards our mission, which is to advance excellence in oncology nursing and quality cancer care. Being able to reframe your perspective a little bit around those decisions is something that you don’t realize until you’re there to do that,” ONS...

Episode 336: Pharmacology 101: EGFR Inhibitors

The ONS Podcast

“Under normal conditions, EGFR [epidermal growth factor receptor] is in an auto-inhibited state. And it’s only when it’s needed that it’s upregulated. But when you have cancers that there is either a mutation in the EGFR or an overexpression, what you see is a dysregulation of normal cellular processes. So you get overexpression or switching on of prosurvival or antiapoptotic responses,” Rowena “Moe” Schwartz, professor of pharmacy practice at James L. Winkle College of Pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, told Lenise Taylor, MN, RN, AOCNS®, BMTCN®, oncology...

Episode 335: Ultrasound-Guided IV Placement in the Oncology Setting

The ONS Podcast

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“There’s actually quite a bit of debate about what the clinical definition of cancer cachexia is, but in its simplest definition of cachexia in this case is cancer-induced body weight loss. You can have cachexia in other diseases, for heart failure or renal failure, but it's basically tumor-induced metabolic derangement that leads to inflammation and often anorexia, which produces body weight loss,” Teresa Zimmers, PhD, told Jaime Weimer, MSN, RN, AGCNS-BS, AOCNS^®, manager of oncology nursing practice at ONS, during a conversation about cancer cachexia.

Music Credit: “Fireflies and Stardust” by Kevin MacLeod

Licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 3.0

Earn 0.5 contact hours of nursing continuing professional development (NCPD) by listening to the full recording and completing an evaluation at courses.ons.org by December 27, 2026. The planners and faculty for this episode have no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies to disclose. ONS is accredited as a provider of nursing continuing professional development by the American Nurses Credentialing Center’s Commission on Accreditation.

Learning outcome: The learner will report an increase in knowledge related to cancer cachexia.

Episode Notes

To discuss the information in this episode with other oncology nurses, visit the ONS Communities.

To find resources for creating an Oncology Nursing Podcast Club in your chapter or nursing community, visit the ONS Podcast Library.

To provide feedback or otherwise reach ONS about the podcast, email [email protected].

Highlights From This Episode

“Anorexia is often a component of cancer cachexia. In fact, some people call it cancer-induced anorexia, cachexia syndrome, because the tumors produce factors that act on the hypothalamus and hindbrain to produce, among other things, anorexia, but not just anorexia, you know, feelings of misery, anhedonia, wanting to withdraw from social interactions, but definitely altered desire to eat and altered taste of food.” TS 5:32

“Cachexia is most common, you know, where it’s been examined, in patients with upper GI cancers. You could think of those as risk factors for cachexia. So that includes, of course, head and neck cancer, esophageal, gastric, pancreatic, liver and biliary cancers. It’s also found to be very prevalent among patients with any kind of metastatic cancer and very frequent in patients who are hospitalized for their cancer. But beyond that, about half of patients with non-small cell lung cancer also experience cachexia.” TS 8:21

“I’ve been told by oncologists that cachexia is frequent in patients with certain rare cancers like ocular melanoma, small cell lung cancers, but generally speaking, cachexia is underrecognized. Most people have in their minds this picture of someone who’s sort of end-stage cachexia, that’s emaciated. And in fact, most patients, or many patients in the U.S. at least, arrive with a cachexia diagnosis and may be overweight or even indeed obese, but that does not mean that they don’t have cachexia.” TS 8:54

“I have tremendous respect for our nurses who take care of patients, and all of them have their preferred screening tools. There is no single accepted or mandated approach to diagnosing or treating someone with cancer cachexia. And I should say that I didn’t mention a widely accepted definition for cancer cachexia in the field, a diagnostic criterion, is weight loss of greater than 5% in the prior six months—and this is unintentional weight loss. TS 11:05

“I hear from family members all the time about how this was actually the most distressing part of their loved one’s cancer journey because it’s something so visible. And also, so much of our relationships happen over meals. And what I’ve heard time and time again is that telling someone that there is a word for this, cachexia, and explaining that it is the tumor—right, it’s the cancer that’s causing this appetite loss—would have helped because there tends to be a lot of conflict over meals, you know, a lot of guilt on sides when it comes to eating and trying to prepare meals that are appetizing for the person with cancer.” TS 22:24

“I think that we don’t often think about how much the cachexia itself affects the cancer treatment outcomes. The presence of weight loss correlates with treatment toxicity. Chemotherapy is often dosed on body surface area. Patients who have very low muscle, for example, experience greater toxicities, and maybe we should be dosing based on lean muscle mass. Patients with cachexia have poor outcomes after surgery. And actually, patients with cachexia don’t respond to immunotherapy, which of course has been transformative for cancer care. So, treating cachexia may actually enable patients to respond better to all of their cancer interventions.” TS 28:45

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