A study of patients with metastatic lung cancer by researchers based in Brazil and the United States has found that their performance in simple physical tests such as sitting down, standing and walking can help physicians arrive at a prognosis and approach to treatment.
São Paulo Research Foundation Oct 22 2024 The findings also included identification in the volunteers' blood plasma of two substances – serine and M22G – with the potential to become biomarkers capable of indicating which patients are most likely to respond to chemotherapy.
In the case of lung cancer, and specifically of non-small cell lung cancer , the most frequent form of lung cancer, the study showed that measuring muscle mass is not sufficient for prognostic purposes and that muscle function should also be taken into account. "We showed that patients who performed poorly in the simple physical tests also displayed impaired oxygen consumption, whereas patients who performed well were satisfactory in this item. We believe the inflammatory process associated with the tumor results in a set of metabolites circulating in the bloodstream with potentially negative effects on muscle cell metabolism.
Methodology The study sample comprised 55 NSCLC patients who attended the São Paulo State Cancer Institute . Most were men, all of them smokers. They received treatment between April 2017 and September 2020 and were followed up for about three months on average during chemotherapy administered at the hospital.
In Harvard, the blood samples and muscle cells collected in Brazil were submitted to metabolomic analysis to detect the intermediate or end-products of their metabolism in an attempt to identify molecules that could be used as markers of the disease. Next steps will include reanalyzing all data for all patients with the aid of artificial intelligence in search of biomarkers that can help understand the mechanism of the disease, and investigating whether physical exercise during chemotherapy can improve the overall health of NSCLC patients.
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