Nutrition Research Is Needed to Enhance Outcomes in Oncology

Nutrition is an important part of oncology care, but it is often underresearched and not discussed. As part of supportive care, this is an area that Declan Walsh, MD, believes is worth researching.

Walsh, chair of the Department of Supportive Oncology at Atrium Health Levine Cancer Institute, noted that if patients have obesity at the time of diagnosis, it could affect treatment outcomes and create more adverse effects.

He stated that the field evolving around nutrition and malnutrition should be discussed more often, which may allow clinicians to give their patients more concrete answers on how to best live their lives.

Transcript:

There are lots of [next steps], because some of these areas have been quite neglected over the years. The one that I would pick most prominently is the area of nutrition and malnutrition. A huge proportion of patients with cancer in the United States who are diagnosed this year will [have] either overweight or [obesity]. That is a major issue in terms of, first of all, why somebody gets cancer. It also complicates the management of the disease if they, for example, have diabetes as a consequence of obesity, and it affects other outcomes in many ways. There’s also the issue of undernutrition: people losing weight. These are not uncommon problems. The majority of people now diagnosed [have] overweight or [obesity], and weight loss and severe weight loss are very common complications of cancer and, indeed, of cancer treatment and significantly change the outcome. I would be advocating for a major change in how we view the issues of nutrition and malnutrition in cancer care. Patients recognize this already, as a very common question when somebody’s diagnosed with cancer is, “What should I eat?” We don’t have a very good answer for that, unfortunately, [even though] these issues are highly prevalent and highly impactful in the trajectory of the illness.